f13.net

I've been playing EVE for about 2 weeks casually, and while I hated SWG-Jump-to-Desktop-Lightspeed  I am enjoying this game.  I'm playing casually, but the aesthetic, design, connectivity and general social environment have impressed me.  It's succeeding at doing some things very well, while not trying to do all things, and to me this is commendable management.  Basically, it's an economic and PvP Space Sim, catering maybe to more detailed and experienced gamers.  But so far so good. 

What prompted me to post this is the following email.  In maybe 7-8 years? of online gaming, I have never once received an unsolicited customer support email as a "new customer" giving me advice and explanation.  Other than the standard welcome emails as a new sub, I have never seen a game take the time to figure out who are new players and what kind of out-of-game contacts they might need.  In this case, to explain an upgrade, because I might not understand otherwise what's going on and why I can't play.  Well done.  Shows they give a shit and are organized.

Congratulations on being the person that managed to tempt me to investigate this game.  Your competition consists of drunken phone calls interrogating me as to when my pig-fucking ass is going to resub to WoW, so that is quite an achievement.

Hah, never been called pig-fucker but the drunken calls I can relate to.

You had me at Hello.  Seems a lot of the gaming blogs I follow are switching to Eve as well.  Of course, it will take me a few days to re-activate, but I am slow like that. 

Eve is....slow.

Eve is a spreadsheet with a pretty screen saver and the occasional loss of all your effort due to the crashing of your spreadsheet program before saving kind of game. It's great if that's what you want, but I fell asleep playing it.

The slow play does not bother me too much, as I still have WoW and pr0n to play/watch in between flights. 

I am reaching the point of my gaming cycle where I resub and/or play a grey shard of UO.  I want to break this cycle, but the current offerings do not allow this to happen.  I am becoming jaded 1.5.

Jaded 2.0 is where it's at.  I suggest you get the latest patch.

The story in PC Gamer sounded pretty cool.

We use "pigfucker" as a term of endearment.  Er, kind of.

"There's a new flypoint and a troll village, it's fucking sweet."
"I will still have to walk there, ass."
"We can do it, pussy."
"You always forget that I can't stealth and leave me behind, fucker."
"Your mama can't stealth."

Anyway, I almost reactivated WoW last night.  Right now I have eve-online.com loaded in a separate tab.

I think the micromanagement will get to me at some point, but I'm playing lightly, enjoying non-endgame aspects.  And frankly, the people playing all seem older and probably want to invest their time in an online service that so far seems very robust and non-farmery.  Dunno if you have had client problems.  The PvP game I have yet to see.  But I have logged out abruptly in mid-warp several times with no penalties.  Ultimately, it can't be anymore spreadsheet-y than SWG crafting (http://www.swgcraft.com).  Witness what I used to use for Weaponsmith crafting. (http://www.swgcraft.com/downloads/SWGWSToolV6.0.zip)  Finally, they're a small firm, and I'm pro-Indie and overly biased towards small software shops.  

[Edit] spelling

EVE is great! If I didn't play EVE I would never get a chance to read all the books and watch all the movies I do. While I'm "playing" EVE I get so much more done in my life.

EVE Online -- "It's the only game to play when you need to get other stuff done"

I smell the sarcasm, but honestly that sounds great.

I quietly picked Eve up 3 weeks ago. I first tried it about 6 months after it released and was turned off by the general lack of content and exceedingly slow pace; but then, at that time, I had a lot more free time on my hands (yay, unemployment), so active games were more my speed.

I've been playing with a couple folks from the office and we've formed a little corp to help share stuff among ourselves. So far, it's been really positive; the offline skill training that I hated earlier has turned into a big selling point, since I can't catass 2 victory. I like that I'm not compelled to come home every night and play Eve for 2+ hours to continue unlocking new content; I can check in on my skills 2-3 times a day and play with the newly-unlocked toys on my own schedule.

Combat is languid, but I see it more as a strategic combat system rather than the controlled-chaos of WoW and the other graphical dikus. It's enjoyable and, thanks to the pace, the battles don't feel binary; there's a big gray area between 'owning' and 'getting owned', and the battles switch back and forth in advantage when the sides are balanced.

My biggest annoyance is travel time. Taxiing to a stargate or station sucks.

But yeah, when I get asked about it these days, I lead off with the warning that it's a very slow-paced game, so if you prefer action or twitchy stuff, don't even consider Eve. If you liked Privateer, Elite or Trade Wars, you'll probably love it.

I've always had fun with EVE, even if it is pretty slow sometimes. I think you just need to be in the mood for it .. it's a good game to play while studying and generally doing other stuff.

The biggest thing for me was the travel and when I wasn't in a corp it got pretty boring if I didn't have other stuff to do or someone to talk to.

If you guys are interested in starting an f13 corp I'll join :)

That story got me to finally download the trial last night. Should be a nice distraction during the Christmas break. I always had a hard-on for their brand of space aesthetics. One of the better looking games I've seen in recent times.

Any link to this story? The only story I have read was about a giant scam.

That was a great story too, and ties in nicely with our EQvUO thread...  EvE is much more of a UO-style open ended game, which we need more of.

Its a game I really really want to like, but playing by yourself just sucks, and I'm not really in the mood to find guilds anymore.  If a game doesn't come with an established start point of people to play with I just wont bother these days I'm afraid and EvE never generated a ton of interest among friends.  I had a roommate and RL buddy who tried it but we all quit because the pacing was just too drastic a change from the fps games we were used to.

It's funny, just last week the canucks at corpnews were talking up EVE.
I wonder if EVE will be the first MMOG to start off niche and move to wider audience.

Only the lonely people taxi to stargates.  Look up a tutorial on how to make instant bookmarks.   I only used autopilot when I needed to AFK and was traveling in >.5 space.

Eve is a fun game with it's flaws like any other.  The difference being what flaws you're willing to overlook.  Megatravel times is something  that eventually got me, but the rest of the game was stellar.  (Yes, combat is strategic rather than twitch.  Right ammo, right mix of weapons, right ship and right enhancers.  Or you can brute-force it like I did often enough.  :-D )

Those people who miss the 'good old dread lord days' should check it out and look into becoming pirates.  It's a playstyle that's supported rather than viewed as an unintended consequence of the mechanics.

I'm aware of how, but I'm rarely in the same set of systems long enough right now to make it worth it. I expect that, when I stop being such a nomad, I'll set some up.

http://www.mmodig.com/?p=155

The story is nothing compared to the original Great Eve Scam. That said, *I* could write a story that would make Horizons appealing. Seriously people. Fiction makes you sub to a game? Weird.

Fiction has brought us to the MMOG genre from the very beginning, and why we still bother playing.  And I am not speaking of the game fiction.

Bet you can't.

Basically everyone is playing Eve right now :)

Dave Rickey has been catassing it and just wrote about it on his blog and I keep seeing it referenced just everywhere.

Right now I'm subscribed to Eve, DAoC and WoW and having a lot of fun in all three for different reasons. It doesn't happen often that I feel like a pleased gamer.

Sigh...I've been burned on the "its like the golden dread lord days" too many times.  Can you point me to any links describing the pvp and the level of tankmagedreadlordedness? 

Well Triforcer, I found this link interesting.

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=172529&page=1



To give a sense of scale, 1 billion ISK sells on ebay for over 200 dollars.

Holy Hell.

pwned

Thats comedy fucking genius!

and oh so true - its the first time I have ever felt compelled to use something I've seen posted as a sig...

BTW, how long is the free trial period (without paying anything)?

14 days.  I wish they had a trial for inactive accounts; oh well Ill just pony up the 20 USD and be happy. 

I am not a Scrooge, I am just poor!

edit.  https://secure.eve-online.com/ft/?sk=GHELL  <- Good link for free trial.  I will be on round about Tuesday, and will most likely catass all x-mas weekend.  I know one other person getting the trial.  I wonder if I can talk Tragny into joining us; mwahahaha.

Not sure if CCP has a DL for the client either; here is an alternate in case they do not. -> http://www.gamershell.com/news/17215.html

WoW derailed me from EVE due to IRL friend wanting to play, but after realizing the mentality of things I am not sure if I will continue (WoW). 

FWIW, this is as good a time as any to get in, they just rolled out a major content patch (Red Moon Rising) that will change a lot of the fundamentals in ship balance and PvE activity, so the veterans don't have as much of an advantage.

--Dave

I would love to.  IF I could re-activate my account (I keep getting a crazy cannot connect to bank error).  Maybe has something to do with their server reset?  Who knows, its a MMOG!

Server is up.  They had to fix some SQL issues, and everything seems pretty now.  Time for PATCH love!

My name is Arzhel  (Yup, Cheddar was taken as usual).  If you message me and I do not message back do not get upset; I never did manage to fully figure out all the chat window thingies

Cerrano Pax.

If I ever finish the tuturial, I'll come play.

Imho it's better to wait January, when they are supposed to add the new asian bloodlines. This would also help the patch to settle down and some of the bugs fixed.

Fuckers, all of yous.

I guess I'll turn on my account and start CruiserV then come back and see whether anyone of you are actually playing a month from now (fucking V skills take sooo long!).

I am currently mining and working skills.  Got me an ol' fashioned slaver ship retrofitted for expanded cargo space with a lil mining laser mounted on top.  I think next town run I am gonna toss a booster on there.  Any suggestions for a quicker way to make money?  I basically fly out to a 'roid, mine Scordite, and sell the raw ore.  Round trip runs around 3-4 hours and nets me 430k+.  I did buy me one of them fancy ass frigates, but I figure twas best to work me skills and whatnot for now.

I think I could possibly make 400k in 4 hours by just blowing up NPCs, loot, refine the loot into minerals and selling it.

Well that makes me feel better!  Hopefully I can add a hundred or two thousand credits to that once I figure out the best method for selling ore.  Boring as shit, but things will get better once I can work a real mining vessel.  Which is a bit off, but that is ok.

I really identify with this quote.  It's the reason that I liked EVE.

I used to be in the newbie zones mining asteroids, and while I was doing it I would eat, chat with people, lift weights, surf the web, etc.  All the while, not only is your character doing something, but he's training his skills at the same time.  It's kind of like an MMOG that you can play in a way in which it doesn't dictate your life.

Man, all this talk has really got me tempted to resubscribe, but I'm in the middle of Vampire: Bloodlines right now, and then I have to finish BG2. :(

I can be located in Eve as Yaeru. Drop me a line if anyone wants to trade stuff. Or something. My little noobcorp is currently working on getting a Kestrel manufacturing outfit together while we slowly scrape towards being able to run a small moon-mining operation.

Cheddar, mining isn't the only way to make your initial money in EVE. In fact, I think mining in your newbie ship with your newbie laser is almost guaranteed to bore you and burn you out on the game. Do the tutorial and then run missions for the agent your tutorial guy sends you to.

Those early missions often give implants as rewards that you can sell for 500k up to as much as a million or two. That'll keep you in frigates until you get your skills up high enough to make mining a worthwhile endeavour.

Note: Since the patch I hear missions are much harder than they were. My advice may be totally out of date and guaranteed to get you killed now. :)

Played this with a few Corp/F13 folks in January '04, I think it was Hellfire who was running things. Every comment about reading books, catching up on finances, and hitting Refresh at forums was straight on (http://www.grimwell.com/?action=fullnews&showcomments=1&id=64) back then. I don't know who first coined 'interactive screensaver', but it fit. I hear they've sped up travel a bit, but "a bit" to me sounds like nowhere near enough.

That's what killed the game for me. The travel time. I can't play something I'm merely watching for 30 minutes at a time. Even raiding doesn't get that boring. Nothing against Eve of course. I had this problem in EQ, DAoC, and CoH too. As cool as some of the features were, too much downtime's a game killer for me. Sure it may be required to build social ties. But after a while, boredom gives way to drama, and I've got a life to live.

I'd love to hear Eve got so fast it takes no more than 10 minutes to make 20 hops. Then I'd check it out.

Odd you need 2bil to gets that much cash though. Incidentally, that's about what you'd need in SWG creds to get that much cash too :) But seriously, I'd have thought you'd need a bit less given the arduous time sink involved in getting that much Isk in Eve.

Well, money farmers are flourishing in Eve, so money is available to be bought. I wish game companies would focus on solving problems like this. It destroys economies.

The travel time is a major irritant. They were going to do some changes to travel in the last patch, having you warp closer to the gate, but introducing an error. However, it slowed down people who already have complete bookmarks and it left people insanely vulnerable to pirates. And anything as good as bookmarks would leave the pirates without easy marks (ie, the people who don't have bookmarks), so they screamed up a storm about making the warps more accurate.

Eventually they will have to fix the system because the BMs are causing enormous lag, but no matter how they do it, someone's going to get screwed and ccp really does try not to break things that are working.

Meh, travel times are a nuisance but I rarely travel more than 3 or 4 jumps 90% of the time.  I have all my stuff in one system (Nonni) and then set up shop for agent mission/pirate hunting runs in the surrounding systems.  Once I move on I take out my cargo hauler and move everything back to my home base.

I did go back to run the tutorial to get the free implant after I resubscribed and found most players refuse to strike out beyond a couple of systems from theit home empire. 

Find a 0.5 or even 0.4 system with agents nearby and travel times are minimized significantly unless you decide to relocate.

Heh. Pretty funny how there are all these folks playing Eve and not having mentioned it. Must be the pace. But allow me to admit that I re-activated my sub a couple months ago and have been playing as well. I manage to have some fun, get some other work done during travel and all-around having a pretty fun time of it. Yada yada yada. Got a couple characters, but have been concentrating on just one that I created new at resub. Silas Fennec.

Damnit.  First the Corp guys were going on about it now all you are.

I'm really trying hard to not resubscribe.  I'm enjoying WoW still and can only afford 1 MMO right now.

 Curse you all, I miss my Battlecruiser.

Then I'll make it even worse: RMR improved all the BC's, they have 10% more hull, armor, shield, powergrid, and CPU, and they seem to have picked up more slots (at least my Cyclone got a med slot, but then a lot of Minn ships did).  You can actually fit a full set of cruiser-grade guns on them now, which makes them a real threat.  They also added destroyer equivalents to interceptors with built-in warp bubble generators, and *cloaking* cruisers with huge bonuses to webifier range (both to act as counters to the interceptor frigates).

Missions got harder from what I have heard, but the bounties and loot tables have been improved across the boards and especially for the level 4 missions.  And rats seem to be easier in general, people have been killing NPC battleships in interceptors and I took one out in my Cyclone, something I never could have done before RMR (took way too damned long and too much ammo, though).  It looks like CCP was trying to deliberately inflate the cash and module economies to increase people's willingness to risk ships in PvP.  As a side effect, they'll probably cause a increase in mineral prices (less crap loot to be recycled and more cash), which should make mining more lucrative.  Especially as the new Titan and Carrier ships have *insane* mineral requirements, and all the alliances are scrambling to build them.

--Dave

Mineral prices won't go up anytime soon. Every, and I mean every system has chinese farmers stripping every belt so the mineral prices have dropped through the floor. It's pretty obvious when each group has characters that were created within minutes of each other and are about 4 months old.

I cancelled my 24 mil skillpoint char when I couldn't find enough ore to make any ships.  When CCP added content that was priced in the billions they must have known the sale of ISK on EBay was going to go through the roof.

It seems in every MMO that farming has become pretty blatent and ruins my fun. That's what I get for creating a mining corp. I knew I should have focused on PvP skills and let the chinese do the mining. Hell. I bet 3-4K of the people online are 24/7 farmers.

What's wrong here? Is it actually possible to make ships in this game and PvP with them without fear of setting yourself back ages of mining time or loads of IGE dollars, or is this game even more of an uphill struggle than Shadowbane such that losers become quitters?

It sounds like bhodikhan was a crafter.  His problem wasn't that he was losing ships, but that he couldn't find enough resources to make ships to sell.  His 24 mil skill points are likely in Mining/ Crafting/ Research rather than Flying/ Gunning.   Probably not something you'd want to do unless you have access to an Uber Corp and the vast network of resources/ quarrantined low-sec systems they control.

As I understand it, Farmers are only a problem in Empire space. (Security .5 and up) where the NPC Uber cops will blow you up if you fire on anyone.  In stretches of space controlled by players, they just let the farmers mine then blow them up and take their stuff.

What Mahrin is referring to is the fact that if you lose a fight in EvE you lose your ship.  While there's insurance at a reasonable cost, it only covers the price of your hull, not the modules you added-on or the stuff in your cargo hold.  That means if I were to get blown-up in my 30mil Battlecruiser I'll get my 30-mil back, but still have to have the cash/ resources to reinstall the other 5-mil+ of guns/ ammo/ fittings I'd installed.. and I had some cheap shit on my ship. (Not even Tech 2 beyond Guns.)   

This cost makes a lot of folks very risk-averse.  You're not going to be willing to PvP if your PvE or trade-route income can't support losing that cool ship and replacing everything on it.  If I remember right, Dawn Falcon over at Corp said he lost about 5 very expensive ships in one particular engagement his corp was involved in.  He'd been playing a LONG time, and had the funds to absorb it, however.  To someone like me where 30 mil was a significant investment I was flabbergasted. 

The first unwritten rule of Eve is: Do not Fly what you can't afford to replace.. often.  For new players this means sticking with Frigates for quite a while, because they're cheap.  The upshot is that a well-flown and well-equipped Frigate has a chance against that 24-million skillpoint pilot in his 300 million dollar ship, unlike the level 1 vs a level 60 scenario in most RPGs.  So while you may FEEL gimpy, you're not really as gimpy as you feel.

Edit:

I am weak, but CCP is making me strong. I tried resubbing just now but their server puked when I hit 'reactivate my account.'  I will take this as a sign and just play Civs4 again instead.

For the first time, I'm trying this out.

Got myself a Griffin frigate with some launchers and a nice laser on it. I think I'm leaning more towards combat than anything else. Acting as a miner escort for some of you and trying to blow up interlopers might be cool.

But really, I have no idea what's going on. I just run missions and use autopilot.

Fuck my resolve is weakening past the breaking point, I'm doomed if I ever bother to have my account name and password sent to me...

I seriously think it would be cool if we could get a whole mess of people playing together for the next couple of months. Some of us have tried before with WoW, but it never quite works.

Make it work, damnit.

Attention span the size o...

Kitty!

I'm not really a crafter anymore. I've got most gunnery and missle skills trained to 5. I also own and fly Interceptor, Battleships, BattleCruisers, and well fitted Cruisers. Most Nav, Engineering, and Spacecraft are also almost all level 5 skilled. I've got Cloaking trained to 5 so I can sneak past most blockades. I can run level 4 missions solo with my Raven ( even with the missle nerf ). After the last patch I'm still not sure if my Thorax is that strong anymore due to the cut in drone capacity.

Just sucks to have trained my mining, manufacturing, and refining skills so high only to have them basically negated by the huge influx of chinese ISK farmers. If you haven't noticed they're everywhere.

I'm just wondering at which point I become...relevant.

With this group, think in terms of weeks. That's what happened with us in PS, SWG, CoH, and Eve. I actually had a great time with folks here in these games. The jaded hate stuff really doesn't come out in the games :) But we're all victims of ADHD or something because we get bored quickly.

When posting becomes more fun than playing, you know the game's interest fu was just not there. And being a group of people who know each other for awhile, when more than three people quit at once, most others either scatter to other ingame guilds, friends they knew, or out also.

Only in SWG did we survive that, but mostly because by the time the people started quiting, they had already introduced their friends to our guild, and some forum lurkers showed up too.

Finally, it's Eve. As different as it is, if it's not engaging in real time, it's going to be hard to hold attention. And offline advancement is not a feature. It's an excuse.

Just want to manage your expectations :)

Oh, I know. But I have no real commitments for at least 9 months, so I can afford to do stuff like this.

If someone wants to show me the ropes, that'd be fine and dandy.

Yea, and sorry if I was coming off dismissive. Gaming with this group is worth it, no matter for how long.

Something I forgot to comment on earlier:
I'd say UO and EQ were there first, and then WoW.

UO because it really blew the lid off of MUDs going graphical and all. EQ because it tripled that, and WoW because, for the most part, the talking heads thought the genre was fairly saturated and would forever be relegated to a slow trickle of players.

If Eve ever retrofits some form of combat people could do fulltime, and for it to be fun from the moment a newbie enters the game, then I can see it really exploding. But right now it feels more like a "mature player's" MMORPG, requiring vastly different preferences and ways to play than your average grind-to-Raid. It's also a good respite from the out-in-front AAA titles gaining all the newbies, if someone wants to avoid them.

Stopped playing.

Realized it wasn't an X amount of turns per day game.

Oh yeah, forgot to mention that the name is Strazos Strovanov.

I should really be a tester for MMOGS. Not that i'd do that job. This is the result of me trying to get anything done on EVE's account creation site - after multiple errors concerning an apparent inability to validate my CC info (on 2 cards):

Fatal error: Unable to open /cgi-bin/eve_online.cfg/scripts/enduser/asknew.php in Unknown on line 0

sigh

We already all are. We just do it for free.

I had some cc trouble until I put spaces between every four numbers.  I don't know if that fixed it, but it worked after that.

Longest.  Tutorial.  Ever.

You mean: we pay for the priveledge. Screw a job, we'll pay *you* to test *your* game!

Edit:

Oh, my main char is Irek Dabry, but you can find me with Viin Seeven as well.

I've been playing for a few months now, just passed the 4 million skill point mark. I'm now turning towards some 0.0 or pvp action but really have no idea where to turn. I'm aware of many larger corps and alliances, but which one is the one for me? It's really quite hard to know what type of corps they are and what they do day in and day out. If I join up with one alliance, will other alliances forever ban me from joining if I don't like the first one? Plus many aren't even recruiting.

Regardless, even though I don't play a lot, I'm still enjoying my time in EVE. I think the realtime/offline skill training does more to keep me subscibed than anything else does.

The boards can actually help you find the right corp/alliance.  The recruitment threads are typically pretty thought-out and detailed.  Too bad their forum format is ass though, I forget why but I know I've always felt that way.

There is also a recruitment channel in game, or maybe that is just the noob/general channel? Anyways, I often see people recruiting in the various general channels.

Well, i never tried EVE out on the first go around so i'm a complete n00b. Still, i like the interface lots, very pleasing and appropriate for a space exploration/conquering type game. Finished the tutorial and am now floating around in my garbage scow wondering what to do. We'll see if it sticks, but i've enjoyed the first 10 hours. Talan Crossborn is the handle, subject to change on discovering i picked the most gimped faction/race choice in the near future.

From the way it sounds, you can learn all the skills and get all the items one way or the other anyway, so you beginning choices only matter in the beginning.

They just broke 100k subs, almost double what they had one year ago.

http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=265211

Broke 20k online yesterday too. Guess the 1:5 peak concurrent users:subs rule of thumb ratio still holds too.

Very cool. I think CCP does a good job and I'm glad to see that my recent renewal helped them get over 100k.

I will say, it's hard to get back into it once you've been gone for awhile. I'll have to spend time reading over the patch notes and see what's different. It'd almost be easier starting over except that I already have almost 5mil in skills that I'd hate to lose...

Wow. Just wow.

Is it me, or do all the NPCs post-RMR seem to have afterburners or MWDs? I can open fire on a frigate rat at 40km in my Caracal and within seconds he's circling me at 5km.

Damned glad I invested in missiles instead of turrets now...

Actually this is a MAJOR misconception and I just realized I should let you guys know asap how this really works.  Your initial character creation choices can save you HOURS-DAYS of training time.  First off, you need to decide what skill areas you will have the character focus in.

Then look at the two skills involved in those areas.  Maximize your characters stats in those areas through the starter traits.  Then you first few days of training should be just raising those skills even higher, if you want to really maximize your training time/skill ratio you can then get into implants but getting beyond +3 (I think) requires some serious investment.

Also it is smart to specialize as much as possible in what skills you start with, any of the starter skills can be purchased on the cheap and trained to level2 in like 45min but the higher ranks are exponentially longer.  Ideally you want to have at least one skill you think you'll need at level4 when your character is created.

One last note, despite what the game says, you can pause a skill in mid training then start another without penalty.  I know that threw me off several times.  But again I haven't played in like 6 months, so perhaps that warning has been removed or is accurate at this point.

The difference will not be noticeable until you start training the newbie skills to rank4-5 but once you start having to work on any of the tierII skills we're talking about differences in days for each point -or something in that ballpark.  As for starting race, well I think that matters, because really making it through the first two months of EvE are the hardest part, as you have not established the social contacts needed to keep the game interesting and as in all games the newbie game sucks compared to the stuff you get to do later.  If you want to fly ships from a race it is usually a good idea to be that race as that will save you 3 levels in ship skills as well as training the particular weapon class.

Christ that's the truth. I still haven't finished it.  Whatever.  

The game is slow but it's fine for me for now -- I'm not interested in catassing the forums to learn everything.  I'll just worm my way along learning stuff.

Didn't play this week at all, moving house and waiting for reconnection.  In game name is Soln.

The tutorial is long, but worth it I think. Along with EQ2's, it's one of the best, I think.

Make sure you finish the tutorial and first storyline mission. You get an implant at the end and it's usually worth a million ISK or so. Some easy cash there. Check your email for offers from agents, you get storyline missions that way.

The recruiting is overwhelming and nobody really explains how they stand in the big picture. It's hard to weed through them all. The ingame recruiting channel sucks, IMO. Lots of spam.

Yes, you can switch skill training all the time and not lose the progress on the skill you are switching from. I leave skills that take a long time on over night or if I'll be offline for a while. While I'm playing, I switch to some shorter skills - 15 minutes to 2 hours - and back to the long skill before I log out.

Also, don't be in any rush to move up ship classes. Spend a lot of time in Frigates if you can. The bigger the ships are, the more skills you need to be effective in them. I'm constantly back tracking because I trade up too fast only to find out I need X & Y skills to really be good in that ship, so back I go to the class below and start training them. I'm staring at several skills I want that need over a month to train from 4 to 5.

Also, if you think you are in for the long haul, train up those learning skills before anything else if possible. They increase how fast other skills train up.

For those of you making characters, check out http://www.eve-offline.net/. They have a character creator that will show you what skills you'd end up with once you are done creating.

Try to get level 4 in at least one skill.

For example: Caldari, Deteis, Tube Child, State War Academy, Operations, Command, Captain Training
Nets you: Caldari Frigate 4, Leadership 2, and a bunch of level 1 skills. Int 7, Char 6, Perc 5, Mem 7, Willpower 9

Since I fly Frigates, this was a good way to start out as it gives you access to almost all of the Caldari frigates.

It can be pretty complex when you start looking at the stuff you want to do. Basically, Willpower and Perception are the main skills for combat, with Int helping.

The Character Guide (http://www.eve-online.com/guide/en/) might also be useful to someone.

mispost :)

I kicked around in my trial character, and am enjoying it so far. It's a little weird playing a game with an in-game web browser (which sucks, btw).

But I really wish there was more explanation of the skills available. Something like a "Tech Tree" that you get with Civ. It's so daunting to see all these skills, and have no idea what they mean. And knowing that eventually the skills takes *weeks* to learn, it makes me very nervous about gimping a character, or wasting time traveling down skill trees I won't really like/need in the end anyways.

So I'll probably sub after the trial, and give it a go for a bit. Is there any logic to picking a race? I'm mostly driven by the aesthetics of their ships. My trial character is Caldari, and I hate it because the Caldari ships look dumb. Is there any difference if I rerolled as a new race?

There used to be a really good char-planner out there on a site called eve-i, but I think the site's gone bye-bye.  Was a really great planner, though. Would adjust your learning time based on your stats, could login to chek the actual status of your character's learning,  and plugged-into a ship builder that would let you plan exactly what you could use ahead of time. 

I wouldn't worry so much about your skills. Do the stuff you know you need or would like to do, if you have 'spare' time between learning new skills, you can always increase your base skills (like any of Ship Command skills). I didn't learn anything unless I needed it for something. If you pickup loot that you'd like to use but don't have the skills for, then you buy it and learn it. Doesn't hurt anything except the money you spent to pickup the skill.

If you start to do PvP then there's a whole new set of skills to learn, but hopefully you are in a corp that can help you out with what's good, etc.

I have the blueprints for a Caldari Blackbird if anyone is interested, I'd just need the materials to make it.

I thought I'd throw out a short list of all the f13.net players that posted in this thread, I have to admit, I am tempted to resub/ buy a new gametime card.

Cheddar -  Arzhel 
MrHat    -  Cerrano Pax
Yoru      - Yaeru
Soukyan - Silas Fennec
Strazos   - Strazos Strovanov

Quite likely I missed someone, just add yourself please.

I might be back in game during the holidays, but can't remember my characters name at the moment.

squirrel - Talan Bourne - already rerolled once heh, thanks for the character creator link Viin

Downloading now and going to try an Amarr Trader.

Tebonas - Enkebesh (Gallente)

You will find me for a few days every few months. Sadly I get quickly bored by the game, but I love to give them money once in a while because I like what they did and the positive attitude they are having about everything including customers.

Cheddar -  Arzhel 
MrHat    -  Cerrano Pax
Yoru      - Yaeru
Soukyan - Silas Fennec
Strazos   - Strazos Strovanov
squirrel   - Talan Bourne
Tebonas - Enkebesh

postcount++, heh

Mahrin Skel is playing. Who knows if he's willing to give up his name though.  :roll:

Who knows, maybe there is a player called "Mahrin Skrel" ? :-D

I bought Eve the day it came out. I am Elvis. My name is uber. I also have a character named Jett Rink (maybe even more uber? I dunno).


Eh, I played a character named Arythan more often though. I stopped playing when I noticed that all I was doing was logging in every so often to train up.

ROFL!

(http://www.cesspit.net/drupal/storeroom/eve/mahrin.jpg)

Bravo, instead of him coming on and confirming his identity, zee dev stalker did it.

After SB was channeled in that other thread, the games mahrin's company work at (http://www.virtualpups.com), scare me. (http://www.virtualhorseranch.com) :-D

EDIT: Fixed spelling, added :-D

I like Orbis immensely. They're doing what I've said forever (well, since Waterthread as far as this "forever" is concerned). Don't bother competing with the mainstream market. They aren't worth it and are far too annoying.

Don't get me wrong, nothing against their products, I agree with you wholeheartedly that "nice" is the future of at least the smaller developers.

But seeing Bruce being named 3 times and then reeding something about "breeding your puppy/horse" made me uncomfortable  :dead_horse:

It's also just plain good business practice. I have made Blue Ocean Thinking (http://www.amazon.com/gp/product/1591396190/qid=1135083341/sr=8-1/ref=pd_bbs_1/104-3822346-4892715?n=507846&s=books&v=glance) required reading at work.

Well, I tried to put a bounty on Mahrin, but it seems the system accept only bounties on character with a low security status.

/deluded

You know, if I was a developer I would be REALLY afraid.

If one of them goes missing one day, chances are good he lives in your basement with amputated limbs.

Virtual puppy mills and glue factories for the win!

So whats your name, in game ? :evil:

HRose?

No, really. I have a character under that name but that I don't use from a year. Now playing a different one and I'll restart when they'll finally add the new asian bloodlines. I never went past the noob level and still messing around blowing up NPCs, running level 1 missions and then losing everything because I use to dare too much without safe nets.

I have a F13 chat channel going, you can join by clicking on Channels and Mailing Lists while docked, then click Create/Join. Channel name is 'F13'.

Ah, that is good thinking.  I don't plan on sticking with the character I am running through the tutorial, but the name is Farrie.  On the other hand, my "throwaway" character was the one I went the farthest with in EQ.  The plan, however, is to finish the tutorial, do more research on char creation, and roll up a Yegolev.  I'd like to work on mining/trading, but will probably also roll up a combat guy at some point.

Unless you plan to buy two accounts, why do that? You can only have one character training at a given time, so just train everything you want on the one guy.

Yah there's really no reason to have more than one character. I have two created just so that I have alts in different parts of space - that way I can check the markets in that area without having to travel out of the region I'm in. Other than that, there's no reason at all to have them.

As for your race/setup, it doesn't matter that much. My only advice is to learn as many of the Learning skills as you can (or at least ones that will help the primary skills you are going after). For example, if I were to start over (haha not likely) as a miner/trader I would do something like this:

  Gallente -> Intaki -> Reborn -> Center for Advanced Studies -> Industry -> Mining -> Remote Mining

Which gets you Mining II and the use of drones. Not the best starting skills (I started with Frigates IV just by luck), but your memory starts at 11 which will help you learn skills faster.

Then learn, in this order:

  Learning to level 4
  Instant Recall to 3
  Analytical Mind to 3

And then do all of your mining / drone / etc skills. Honestly, I wouldn't start over, I'd just pick up wherever you are. Once you do the Learning skills your mining/etc skills will go a lot faster, so you really won't gain *that* much by making a new character. (Unless you happen to like another race's ships better (but then, you can learn to fly them later if you want to)).
 

My character is Caldari and started as a miner. Now he is all combat and pilots Minnie ships only. I did dabble in Amarr ships some too. It's nice to have a variety of skills so if I feel like mining I can do that, to take a break from combat.

Hey, whatever the pros think.  My reasoning was probably flawed.  On the other hand, I haven't even made it through the tutorial, so now is a great time to start over if I don't like my name, face or race... each of which is true.

Also there is a general anti-mangina tone around here, so I was going to roll a male, just in case I managed to play with some forum-peers.

Strazos usually girls it up, so I'm suprised he didn't embrace his mangina this time.

I think you can change your face for a fee, but if you really want to change your name or race for some reason. Best take care of that stuff before you have 10 million skill points into it.

This is the first time I have been embarassed to be a mangina.

Good idea.  I frown on virtual crossdressing.

I think I gimped my character already. Gunnary Rank 1 Level 4 and Charisma 11. After reading the description of Gunnary Rank it seems to suck.

I think Gunnery is good but yeah Charisma blows hard.  Really bringing anything other then Cha up is a good idea, if I remember right.

I disagree with Vin's "no need to reroll rignt now" assessment.  If you've played around with the game enough to know what you want to do, play with the character creator he linked to and see how far you can get along your path.  Even if you've been training for the past 4 days, there's a good chance you can get farther along by rerolling than training up. You're still new, so rerolling isn't like you're going to lose a few million, much less a few hundred K skillpoints.

   I was talked-into it after playing for a week and worried that I'd be far behind.  Instead, I wound-up almost 30k exp ahead of where my week-old characer was, and able to fly the ship I'd been busting my hump to get to from the start. (A Rifter) along with some better gunnery skills.  Rerolling early can be a Good Thing(tm)

Gunnery is needed for all the turret skills, so it's a good to have - otherwise you can't shoot any guns. Charisma - eh, not that great but it will help you with contacts (better missions). Other than that, I donno what it's good for.

To Mersuk's comment, I certainly don't see anything wrong with rerolling. The only reason I advise against it is because you'll spend more time wondering if you have a gimp character or not, rather than playing the game and moving forward. After you've played for a month or so it all becomes much less of an issue.

This is by far the most awesomest thing to come out of Lums mouth.  EVER.

Noobler.

I don't like you.


Back on topic:  The F13 chatroom is pretty groovy.  I just realized today that you can turn off the "blink" effect on a chat window by right clicking on the tab: this is handy, especially if you have the general chat thingamabobber open.  Does anyone have a plan to start a corp?  I have my cruiser (bought it months ago) and am working on getting shiny guns and some sort of turbo booster on it.  Mining is starting to become annoying; you guys were not kidding about ore prices going to shit.  I only make 400k per run in my slaver as it stand. :( 

rofl lolz

Actually, I went male this time. I don't know why, but I tend to mangina it in games that are less serious. While I might mangina in GW or WoW, I go male in games like EQ 1/2, EnB, and MUDs.

Lets just hope he takes life serious.

My other HDD responds with a resounding Yes.

Is that where you store all of your pr0n?

:rimshot:

Hm, if we get this thread to 10 pages, maybe we get our own child-board ?

Har.

After cramming for exams and checking eve every so often, I now have my first frigate.
Is there any common types of ammo you guys need made?

I make all my own ammo and missiles, so I'm good there. Though I'm sure if you wanted to start making some ammo (just make whatever you'd use) and you have extra, we can store it in the corp hangar for anyone to grab.

Speaking of the corp, I started one and called it 'F13' (sorry, my corp/guild naming creativity function is malfunctioning) which is based at Hageken V - Moon 2 - Caldari Navy Assembly Plant. You can go there to apply to join.

Did you know it costs 1.6mil to start a corp? Ouch!

Once again I curse you all for dragging me back in.

I'm a Mangina, deal with it. Minmatar men are all bald coneheads so I wanted something different but did want to be a Min. because I liked their story.

Name's Morriand A'resse. I'm tooling around in the Metropolis region, doing NPC Rat missions. Anyone that needs frigate-sized modules or turrets just let me know and I'll keep a few out of the recycler for you.

much like in RL  :rimshot:

actually, that's really a  :sad_panda:  comment for entrepreneurs

Cheddar -  Arzhel 
MrHat    -  Cerrano Pax
Yoru      - Yaeru
Soukyan - Silas Fennec
Strazos   - Strazos Strovanov
squirrel   - Talan Bourne
Tebonas - Enkebesh
Viin - Irek Dabry

Corp is set up, and we are working on getting offices in other systems so it does not take 2 hours just to join up.  F13 channel is also in full effect, and everyone is still in the nooblet stage.  Hopefully we can get some thoughts tossed around on how the game is: personally I like it, though I think things will get even better once I get into combat.  Currently I am just training and mining, mining and training.

I do some combat missions, but I'd rather kill people.

You must start small, young Padawan. Get to level 2 agents and maybe even level 3 agents (and be able to do their combat missions) before thinking too hard on PvP.

-Edit-
Here's an updated list of names (this is in my Notepad in EVE):

Arzhel - Cheddar
Ca'adwin Shiin - Gimpyone
Cerrano Pax - MrHat
Enkebesh - Tebonas
Irek Dabry - Viin
Jaakaarr - lurker(tm)
Malathor Kerostas - Malathor
Morriand A'resse - Merusk
Regel - Reg
Silas Fennec - Soukyan
Stone Burner - Krakrok
Strazos Strovanov - Strazos
Tala Bourne - Squirrel
Yaeru - Yoru

Hey I offered but you said no.  I won't even bring the big ship.

My misadventures in EVE are itching to be documented.  They mostly involve the map and travel, specifically as it relates to my slow-ass newb ship.

Send me an evemail when the F13 corp decides to start hiring non-whites.

I believe sensitivity training has been completed. You do have to bathe however.

http://www.eve-ffet.com/

Grab the tool on this website: Eve Character Manager. Make sure to get and install the most recent skills.xml file on their download pages so it patches in all the RMR skills into the tool. This tool will help you plan out what skills you want, what effect various stats has on the learning time, and will sit in your system tray and pop up a reminder when your characters get done training a skill.

25mil and an 18mil skill point characters in Eve. But I don't know the game you are all playing, I moved into 0.0 in the Summer of '04 and haven't seriously played in Empire since. Empire is a different (read: worse for me) game entirely.

Instant bookmarks are your friends - people sell region wide gate to gate, and gate to station bookmarks on escrow for a few mill per region. Definitely worth it, especially if you can get a friend to chip in and then make a copy for them.

I don't understand what the difference between bookmarks and setting destination is.

I'im not playing.

I've been playing off and on since about February.  I'm Zilo Bilge in game.  Minmatar.  My skills and stats are all screwed up and totally not l33t, but he's got too much time on him to start over.  I just chose what looked fun at the moment, instead of really long term planning ahead.  It's only been recently that I did all the learning skills up to Rank 5, and the subsequent specializations.

Bookmarks are so you can get back to a location without having to search for it. For example, you could create a bookmark for the Corp HQ, and then anytime you needed to get back there (from whereever you are) you just open your bookmarks, right click the Corp HQ book mark - Set Destination. And voi la, you can auto pilot back. Otherwise, you have to find a link to that location (so you can do set destination) some other way.

Bookmarks are also used so I can remember where some good agents are or for insta-jump bookmarks.. which are basically bookmarks for different gates so that you can warp to the bookmark (instead of the jumpgate) and end up right next to the jumpgate, allowing you to jump without having to travel those 10 secs or so to the jumpgate. For an example of this, I have a whole set of bookmarks that will let me insta-jump from Hageken to Eystur. Since I did this route a lot when I was previous playing, it helped to cut down travel times when in a slow moving ship (cruiser or larger). Obviously, if you are in a frigate or shuttle, you move fast enough that you don't need these. But once you get into big ships it can take much too long (especially in unsecure space!!!) to reach the jumpgate.

Don't forget to join the F13 corporation if you haven't! We have offices going up in other-than-Caldari space, so you shouldn't have to travel too far unless you are the first.  :-D

This is the most addictive boring game I've ever played.

Maybe they'll use that on their next press release.

Fuck.

I'm totally re-subing after xmas shit is over and I'm back on my comp.

Fuckers.

This is the most boring game ever, but it is such a good premise and really does have almost everything I want in a MMO..  Space is big n stuff.

I'm prob not going to play for awhile, but I'll skill train and shoot the shit with people, hell I can even help out before everyone surpasses me I should have a few cruisers lying around somewhere.  God my stuff is all over the place from the 3 stints I've played this game.

be prepared to answer newb question after newb question. :-D

Is there a stealth kinda ship? I saw something about explorers but the game seems a little complex to a newbler (a good thing). I wouldn't want to work towards a huge battleship, but a fast and stealthy scout craft that could outrun them would rock. My MO in UO ;)

There are covert op ships (http://www.eve-online.com/itemdatabase/ships/covertops/default.asp) but they need a lot of training before you can use them.

I stopped playing eve after some guy stole the large cargo bin I was mining into right out from under me, while I was mining into it.  I was too much of a newb to know how to anchor it, I kept clicking on anchor but it never worked.  I probably had to train in 'anchoring' for all I know.  That game is brutal to go into starting from square one.  If it had a decent help system I might still be playing it though, it's good for those of us with obsessive-compulsive disorders  :-P.

That's my trepedition. It seems to be pretty complex without really good documentation/tutorial and quick to let other players shaft you for your mistakes. Doesn't sound like a real fun newbie experience (and I played UO back in 'hard' mode).

Really the newb corps are VERY usefull in answering questions you might have.  They are filled with a mixture of morons and people who really do want to help others.  The community is one of the better ones out there, with a great mixture of pirates and good samaritans.

@Sky:  There are covert ops ships, but they are tierII which means we are talking roughly 6 months real-time to be skilled up for the ship and all equipment.  I suggest you stick in the frigate hull-size and just work your way up the progression, they have released several new forms of frigates including interceptors and thanks to EvE's very robust combat system an interceptor can not even be hit at close range by cruiser/battleship weapons because the turrets can't track as fast as they move.  Their are many posts on the eve forums that can explain the magic speed points you need to reach to be neigh invulnerable to all non-frigate turrets.

@Gimpyone:  I'm just as much if not more of a newb, do I know allot of random things?  Yeah but I haven't played in awhile and I've forgotten many things, plus there are many areas of the game I never involved myself in, mining, research, running a corp, agent running I have only done a tiny part of.  I used to like to just try to find the hidden (non asteroid belt) pirate spawns and blow them up for lewts.  Last time I played I was working my way toward purchasing a tierII cruiser, which I planned to hunt wanted players in.  Somewhere in my last room there is a piece of paper with like 30 skills ranging from scanners, to web scramblers that I felt I needed so I could go Cowboy Bebop on some people's asses.

Erm...if you're in a Frigate, even an interceptor....how can you possibly have the firepower to take out cruisers and bigger? I thought they had tons and tons of shield and hull to chew through.

There are ways to cripple the ships, so you could do it but it'd be a lot easier to do with some friends (also in frigates). I know there are certainly times where I've seen 5 frigates take out a cruiser with no problem. Have to stay out of smartbomb range, go fast enough, have enough energy to keep sucking enegry/whatever from them, blocking their warp drive, etc etc. Takes some tactics.

True, but if they can't hit you, you have time.  Also there is a fairly big jump between techI and techII or however they called it equipment.  I think the threat of interceptors was prob. enough to force new tactics to be developed.  Also I'd imagine you could still cause some damage through various non damaging means (warp scramblers, ecm, and various other mostly mid slot modules).

But those bships carrying a full compliment of drones can still get away with using full battleship class turrets I'd imagine.

There are also bombers which are designed to be able to destroy capital ships, and there is a cruiser hull that moves fast but mounts a ton of frigate turrets to counter interceptor/bombers.  I forget if they were called destroyers or something else.

There are a ton of ship classes now though, its pretty cool I really really would love to have the time/drive to learn the game enough to involve myself in fleet battles with the large amount of tactical options available.

I've been flying around in a covert-ops ship just to see what it can do while I finish my Interceptor training. The covert-ops ship is interesting, you can warp while cloaked. Nobody can see your ship. Drawbacks are that you will de-cloak if you get too close to another ship, which can sometimes just happen when coming out of warp. You also cannot really do too much while cloaked, it is mostly for spying - making a warp-to spot for the corp during battles - scouting out the enemy without being seen. You cannot really do any fighting. You must de-cloak to dock with a station or use a gate, but generally you can fly right up to them before de-cloaking. I'm still working on the best ways to leave a station/gate without getting caught by the enemy. Also, the covert-ops cloak costs like 10 times the cost of the ship (~20 million ISK). You can't insure the equipment on the ship so it would suck to get blown up, you'd only recover the cost of the ship. Being in a corp that could make the cloaks would help.

I'm really looking forward to some 0.0 action, Empire can be a little dull at times.

Census Time
Where are we all based?  I figure it's time to cluster up.

Isn't there a cloaked bomber? And it can fire missiles while cloaked?

EDIT; I generally hang out in Caldari areas.

I'm all the way out in Mehatoor with my corpmates, which is smack in the middle of Devoid - a more aptly named region there is not.

Advantages:
 * I can go ratting or mining in nearby lowsec with little fear of pirates.
 * I have kernite in 0.7 here and omber in 0.7 within a few jumps, the +10% types are rarely stripped out.
 * 4 jumps to Heimatar (Minmatar main region), 8 jumps to Domain (Amarr main region) for purchases and sales.
 * Research & production prices are lower, as is competition for slots.
 * Less lag.
 * Most of the region is lowsec, which is great for finding an empty lowsec system for ratting/mining.
 * Entrance to 0.0 nearby (Providence region).

Disadvantages:
 * Have to travel 8 jumps to purchase skills; at least 4 to buy other stuff cheaply.
 * Few research slots overall; generally have to travel quite a bit to get to them.
 * Few agents of any decent quality.
 * Um.. I guess if you like people, the emptiness is a disadvantage.
 * Most of the region is lowsec, which can be scary for newer players.

I'm in some old guild with roots in the origins (beta) of the game. They're in some really bad-ass alliance.

I didn't even realize this until I joined after some brit friends re-invited me and I got ganked at some 0.4 gate. Once the ganker saw the alliance I was in he apologized and paid for my ship. I must have laughed for 10 minutes.

As for covert-op ships. I trained a lot of skills only to be able to fly an EXPENSIVE gimped frigate that could fire cruise missles. Not worth it.  For recon work maybe but it's still a ton of skill to do it properly. Oh yea. You have to un-cloak to fire. Once you re-cloak the missles go away. You have to stay visible until you hit your target or they lock you and blow you to bits. Fun!

In the F13 corp meandering my way through things. I think I screwed up my skills cause I really don't know what I'm doing with my character anymore. Is trading still viable? Minus the mining bit of course. Or am I better off going guns?

No idea on the trading thing. You can't really "screw up" your character though so don't feel too badly about it.  The 'cap' on skillpoints isn't really a cap so much as what the highest clone will contain.  All you really done if you've trained a "useless" skill is wasted training time.  Even that doesn't matter so much unless you've hit one of the +19-days-to-train skills.

If anyone winds-up subbing rather than just fooling around with the 14-day trial, you should focus on your learning skills.  Get them up to at least 4, preferably 4 for each one (Or at the very least just Learning).  This cuts your training time by a HUGE margin for the base skills because your stats will be higher, and learning raises your skillpoint/ hour gain. 

Then, after you've gotten  get those base skills up and you're thinking of moving beyond cruisers (combat pilots, traders use industrial piloting) you should go for 5 in all of them and then the tier 2 learning skills.  Anything beyond Medium-size guns and Cruiser piloting has a looong learn time, so it's time well-invested at the front end to save you a LOT of time at the back end.   Use the Future Falcon Char planner that was linked earlier to see what I'm talking about.

Trading is viable, but it really pays off once you can fly a transport and safely get through low sec areas, if not 0.0

Working on mostly combat skills and got my new missile boat.  I tried mining back in beta once and I will never do that again.  Pirate killing / running missions is just a hellov alot more interesting.... its still an advanced screensaver but hell I never have enough time to view webpages anyway. 

I operate in Gallente space, Verge Vendor region.  Yes, I am Space-French, but I started with 11 Memory so space-screw you filthy Space-Americans.  I have my main stash in some 1.0 system named Cistuvaert or something, but just last night began my mining operations in Scolluzer.  Scolluzer is 0.8 and I can't handle the NPC pirates there right now, but I have a consistent income from mineral sales.  The mineral prices are higher at the one and only station in Cistuvaert, but it's not really better once I factor in three jumps.  In fact, the research station in Cistuvaert is so far from the Allentene jumpgate that my Navitas has to make two separate warps just to traverse the system.  I can't complain too much about a ship I paid 15k ISK for, though.

I like mining.  I expect to like working the market but that is some time off.  I hope to make my ob-comp disorder of use to the corp.  Straz has already offered to fly escort, which encourages me to concentrate on mining/refining and industrial skills.

If you're Gallente you should train your drone skills. Gallente ships almost all have decent sized drone bays and pirates found in .8 space should be easily taken out even with the medium drones.

I just bought the base drone skill a day or two ago after hearing that my race was pretty drone-biased.  I'll take your post as incentive to build on this.  Thanks.

I lost my poor mining drones. I was very careful not leave them behind and I didn't get in a fight.  Does zoning without your drones dock cause you to lose them?

I'm in Caldari space, sticking to the general area of the tutorial (The Forge homebase, The Citadel and Longtrek). I'm currently in the State War Acadamy, I guess I'm a science type with guns and whatnot. Still in my Condor and Bantam (which I bought because I didn't read a mission properly and had to go mining...). Working the learning skills, though I grabbed a couple skills to up my mission payouts and get the ability to slap a couple missile launchers on ye olde tub.

I'm also in Caldari space, doing missions from the Corp HQ.

I don't know much about drones (only used them once many many moons ago) but I figured I'd try to do some mining with some here soon. I know they have to be back in their bay before you can warp away, but other than that they should stick around. Maybe they wear out?

I've setup an office in Gallente space, so anyone working in that area can sign up and use the corp hangar there to share stuffs. We should setup offices in the areas for the other races too if anyone is flying around.

Sky, and all, feel free to join the corp even if you are just on the trial. You don't gain anything by being in the noob corp unless you like talking to the noobs on the corp channel.

Anyone working missions: keep working the same agent. As your loyality goes up your mission payouts go up. If you work the same line of agents for awhile you will get better and better rewards. Learning skills like Negotiation will also increase your mission payouts. Learning Connections will get you access to higher ranked agents (with harder missions + better payouts).




If you guys are interested in some pseudo-PvP, we could hold a tournament of sorts using cheapy newbie ships and shoot each other just for ships and giggles.

Yeah they can't keep up with you if you warp away so you have to tell them to get back in the drone bay first. I've lost countless drones doing that. :) But you can go back and get them if you do it within a half or hour so. When you get back they won't respond to commands but you can approach them and scoop them up and they're ok then.

The selection of drones in the Verge Vendor market seems small, maybe I was expecting some Gallente-specific drones since, you know, there's a Gallente drone skill.  Anyone have any suggestions?  Apparently I only have room for one drone in my Navitas (5m³), and I would really like to have the drone do the shooting so that I can put two mining lasers online at once.  Then again, I guess I could just warp to the station at first sign of target lock... maybe I just need to invest in storage cans.  Decisions, decisions.

The race-specific drone skills require you to get up to Drones V to use them.  That's a long-term investment thing, like most EVE skills.  (Training to V would take 8 more days on my char and I'm already at III.) Just pick-up Drones and level it to III.  Each level lets you control one drone of the light or medium variety. (Heavies require Drones V as well)  Then if you get serious, head into Drones V and pickup the special drones and skills that are allowed by it.

I'd heard most folks use mining drones as opposed to going your route, where the drones do the fighting.  Not sure why that is, but mining drones just required Drones I and Mining II if you want to try that route as well.

I made a room for us EvE people on the F13 TeamSpeak server. So, if you want to hop on just grab the TeamSpeak client from here (http://www.goteamspeak.com/index.php?page=downloads). Use this connection info to get on the server:

Server: 209.59.137.153:7654
Pass: catass2victory

I can register you when I'm on so you can login and .. stuff.

After mucking around for a bit in the trial, I've finally subscribed.

Name is Coyote X, Minmater, although I'm currently training Caldari ships because the Minmater ships look like ass.  Will join the F13 corp if I can find it  :-)

Interested in doing the bounty hunter thing, if I ever figure out how that works in this game.

Edit:  The F13 Corp is 29 jumps away.  Shibail!  :x

Unintalled.  I like the skill system, the rest is crap.

there's a minmatar office in onga vii imperial armants factory.

The irony of this situation is that currently, while being Caldari i'm training Minmatar ships because they look like the Reaver ships from Serenity.  :-D

God fucking damn it!
Everywhere I turn to there is EVE. On every bloody forums, even here.


Thats no longer the case:(
With signature painters, every noob battleship can enlarge your sig to the size of motherfucking planet and kill you with one bloody salvo. Any selfrespecting gate camping team will have several ships (which means several $#%^&@$ signature painters, aaargh!), which means even with 5 mln SP in navigation and fastest frigate available, you won't be able to get through.

Suck, I want me double mic raven/rupture/BC:D

Well I resubed my account (last played a year back for a month or so and before that 3 months at launch)

The new loot rules are nice in that you can vapourise the little shits that steal your loot/ore - on the downside there really needs to be a timer or something so you dont get loads of can left lying around lagging space up if the 'owner' doesnt want them.

I have to admit to being pissed that CCP removed all the static loot cans and rat spawns from the safer sectors - I have a bunch of stuff bookmarked (like ruined stations with floating casks protected by NPC rats) that just arent there anymore - all this does is push the NPC hunters into the high sec belts competing over the few and far between spawns or down into unsafer space where the newbie just won't survive against the player rats. Not a particularly good move IMO.

I wanted to try out one of those new mining barges, but the skill needs industry 5 which is like 5 days for my to train - instantly remembered one of the reasons I left the game previously - they really should allow you to unlearn or remove skills somehow, the clone I need to cover all my skill points is stupidly expensive and alot of the skills I really dont need and with hindsight wouldnt have bothered with if I knew then what I know now.

Define 'stupidly expensive.'  Even at 3.2 million skillpoints (which takes a while to get to, after 4 1/2 months active skill training I'm only at 2.7 million ) a clone only costs 262k each time, and you only need to replace it if you get podded. With negotiations, connections and social at level 3 it's easy to get the cash in one or two level 2 missions just from the payout, much less the loot I gather from the NPC rats.  (level 2's require cruisers, which are fairly easy to get up to and use)

Now, replacing ship components and implants.. THAT I can see bitching about.  Any mission into .4 or lower I'm very nervous now, since I just plugged-in my first implant, which will cost me 2mil if I'm podded on top of ship and component replacements.

This is what is most off-putting about venturing into lowsec space for me... other than the fact I only have two shit-can frigates.  With the threat of gatecampers and the palty insurance options, I think I am going to end up staying in empire space for some time.  This is fine with me for now, since I am actually pulling in OK-to-me money from mining plagiocite.  I have plenty of room for growth before I feel the need to mine in lowsec.

What I ended up doing about the stray pirates while mining was buying an Atron and rigging it up with two small hybrid guns, two overdrive injectors, a civilian afterburner and a ECM module I found somewhere.  I fitted my Navitas with two mining lasers and a mining drone, plus two cargo expansions.  When I get targeted in my Navitas, I warp to the station and get the Atron.  Inconvenient, sure, but I don't lose my Navitas, or more importantly the mining lasers.  Each mining laser cost more than the ship they are fitted to.  The drone... well sometimes you can find drones just sitting around in space. =)

What happens when your warp gets jammed by actual decent pirates?  :evil:

Lowsec space scares me but will be fun when I get a few million stashed away. The cost right now keeps me away. I don't mind risking all when it's fairly easy to replace, like in UO. As long as the fargers don't podkill you, that's lame unless there's good reason. Implants are not so easy to replace!

I wanted to go deep into space with a shuttle to explore, but I forgot to do it before I put in a +1 int implant. Oops.

Kaboom!  ;-)  I lose a 15k ISK frigate and a couple 30k ISK (?) mining lasers.  I get 22k from the insurance and buy a new Navitas and spend maybe 100k on equipment.  I know how that works since I have already had a Navitas vaporized.  C'est la vie, as us Space-French say.  I like to keep a healthy bank account just for such emergencies.  I feel uncomfortable when my liquid assets are not enough to outright buy a replacement ship plus fittings.  I could buy a Tristan to replace my Atron right now, but I would not have enough free cash to buy it again should something bad happen to it.  I don't plan on selling the Atron, either, since it is faster than a Tristan.

I badly need to get podded. I put in about 60 million isk worth of good implants before I started training up my advanced learning skills and I swore that as soon as they were done I wouldn't let them turn me into a sissy. But I lied. :)

Goddamnit. I have been clicking "Mark as Read" on this thread for weeks, sure I wasn't interested in Eve. Then I began to notice that more and more of you folks I have listed as an Xfire friends have been spending a lot of time playing Eve. Hmmm. I decided that I would check this thread out when I got back to work (who reads forums on their OWN time) and see if my interested was piqued.

I will be joining damned soon- it sounds really different, and I am intrigued. Like probably tonight soon. Is there still a free trial available? Can I join the corp and ask tons of n00bler questions? What usually happens is that I talk myself into playing with everyone, then everyone quits within a month. I must have virtual BO or something.

I knew seeing Serenity yesterday was going to screw me over somehow!

Yes, there's a 14-day trial. You can't train some skills on it but it's a good way of getting your feet wet.  And since it's 14-days and everyone's been playing for about half that long your trial would peter out as that 'one month and out' deadline approached. ;)

Free trial = yes, joining the corp is easy and there seems to be a good number of us on in the evening.  I've been the one asking all the noob questions for the past two days. 

See you three weeks when you finish the tutorial!

This game is fun! I login to find my alliance FOE (Forces of Evil) has three wars going on. After losing one BS because I did not know the wars were ongoing I proceeded to lose another Battleship trying to get with the corp to fight.

Then on the way back I got nailed again mere meters from the station.

2 battlesships, 1 interceptor = $300 mil ISK. The look on my face when I realized I'm playing this game? PRICELESS

Boo Yah.

bhodikhan
20 mil skill points and almost broke (again)
I can't even mine with all the death and destruction going on!

They pod kill you.  The only thing that stops them from podding you is, if you manage to get away.  There's no advantage to podding.  You don't get anything extra.  They just do it to add your kill email from Concord to the collection.

I like the term that has been coined for when a NPC Concord ship kills you.  Concordokken.

Ok, so I am still in the fucking tutorial, but it is interesting so far. Will be far more so when I get to do my own shit and get killed like everyone else. Name is Antolin Vakalas. If I travel to the home station of F13, are there any n00b missions there I can run?

What species are you? Space-french, space-american, reaver or sith? If you are Calamari, the first line of Agent missions should net you around 300k (plus a stat-mod chip which you can also sell for cashy money, just not in the newbie systems). That should be enough to start you on your desired path.

I am Frenchy. My storyline agent mission remains unaccepted for reasons I can't yet figure, so I skipped it and started with a couple of courier missions from the regular agents. Got enough to buy a shiny new Atron (which is probably the Geo Metro of Eve, but it beats the shit out of the n00b ship I started with). I am currently on a 16 jump trip to F13 HQ to join.

So far, I am having fun. It is pretty goddamned complex, but that is some of the appeal to me. As long as the complexity isn't overwhelming to the point of helplessness, which it can approach at times. Luckily I figured out how to set the chat channels right away and got some sage advice from the vets here.

Well I havent logged in a day of 2 (still waiting for Ind 5 to finish) so I don't have exact figures on me but I'm hunting rats in 0.5 space that are worth between 8k-14k each (there are the odd harder spawns of kestrels but them make micemeat out of my destroyer before I get in range), I dont have my skill points to hand but going on the above clone (my account has been active a total of 5ish months so its probably not a million miles off) thats about 30 kills before taking into account buying more ammo or repairs to any damaged modules (I have armour/hull repairer so thats covered), also the loot is nothing to write home about (although a corp-mate claims to have had an implant in loot in this particular system). I dont have the insurance cost of my destroyer on me either unfortunately.

As much as it's frowned on in some quarters, Eve becomes much more fun when/if you ebay some ISK because suddenly you can get the skills you want (training time though grrrr) buy some nice ships and modules, get a decent clone and insurance and try some stuff out (like lower sec hunting/mining) without the fear of losing everything and getting sent back to square one (or having to spend forever getting enough ISK together to replace everything you already spent forever buying in the first place!

I hear you. I invested 30 million ISK into some implants to speed up skill training and now when I get missions into low security space I'm balking at them. Sissy indeed.

Go back to your story line agent and accept and do that mission. It's the beginning of an important series that will give you a big boost to your Gallente faction (which is important to talk to other agents) and ends with an implant reward. And if you're lucky you'll get a good one that could sell for as much as 3 million isk and pay for all the frigates you could possibly need while you're newbing it up. :)

Am I the only person that put in the implant instead of selling it? I figured +1 int was worth more than the money.

I did talk to her- I ask her for work, and the  next screen is her telling me to come see her when I get to the station (even though I am already there). The mission shows up in my journal as Not Accepted. I can't figure out how to accept it.

Are you POSITIVE you are in the right station? Agents will show up on the right even if they are not in the current station. Check the agent's info to find the location.

I heard it's a recent bug. There should be a patch in a few days that may resolve that.

I also heard that you should "petition" it (CSR appeals) to have it solved.

If the agent is listed on 'Agents of Interest' you aren't at their station, just FYI. When you check the mission in the journal it should also show Completed next to the objectives in the mission text (double click the entry in your journal), so even though you haven't gotten your reward it should show those as done. (Though, for some kill missions it doesn't show as completed sometimes - even when it is).

Also, we have an office in Gallente space. If you can do Info on the corp you should see an Offices list, one of which should be nearish to you.

I am 99% sure I was at the right station- I used the link to the agent to Set Destination. Once I realized I couldn't accept the mission, I did a kill mission for another agent at the same station.

I am not sure which office I am at for F13 now- someone sent me a link last night and I did a 16 hop trip to get there. I bet there was one closer, but I am too much of a n00b to know or care at this point.

I may go home at lunch to start some more skills and maybe fly back to the station again and try the agent one more time (and then petition if it still doesn't work). If I start the trip on Autopilot, I should be safe sitting in system until I get home from work tonight, shouldn't I? I am pretty sure it is 1.0 or .9 space there.

Yah that should be fine. And even if it's not in .5 or greater space, you can set it to 'Safe' areas only on the Map screen (under autopilot tab) which may take more jumps but it'll make sure you aren't jumped by pirates.

I found your problem, you're grinding for cash.  Missions >> Pirate hunting in .5+ space by a longshot.  Find a security or internal security agent that's level 1 or 2 (depending on your combat skills) and as high of quality as you can must and run missions with them. Also start training-up connections, negotiation and social to at least level 3 - should only take you a day or two.  The friendlier the agent gets with you the bigger the payouts will be for the same missions.

The agent I'm working on is a -6 quality level 2 agent, but my standing with her is 7.2 - standing and my skills raise her quality to 15. That means I'm getting 60k (for a simple "go here and kill" mission) to 150k+ (for deadspace missions) just as my base pay. The bonuses for fast completion of a mission range from doubling your payout to ammo or materials/ modules you can use or sell on the market.  That's fast cash for killing stuff of an equivalent level to the rats your competing against other players for.  Plus you get the bonus of the bounty for each ship and the components they drop on top of the mission payout.

Now, some missions might send you a sector or two into .4 space, BUT if you pay attention when warping into the area (and are cloaked) you'll see if there's any gate campers you need to be aware of on the way back.  If they start sending you to lowspace on a regular basis you just make an instant bookmark and then not worry about it in either event.

+1 int is nice but you're at the point where most of your skills train so fast that you're not even going to notice the difference and you're also at the point where a million or two to buy frigates or upgrade to a destroyer is more important than shaving 30 seconds off the 12 minutes it takes to train Engineering 1. :)

Plus you will inevitably wander into .4 space and get yourself podded. It's a newb rite of passage like learning to take a couple steps away from people standing too close to you at the bank in UO circa 1998.

Don't worry about it though. Other opportunities will come up. Implants are common rewards for the early storyline missions.

If  you've checked and made absolutely sure you're at the right place then it's definitely worth doing a petition over. That first storyline sequence is crucial. And CCP are quite amazingly fast in responding to stuff like that. I think there's a category devoted to being "stuck" in a mission that gets priority treatment.

I got a +1 mem implant when I did mine and plugged it in. That plus a +1 int implant (900k isk, I think) have probably shaved days off my training time by now. The mem/int ones are the best starter implants since they'll shave time off training your learning skills up to level 4. They're worth the paltry 1 mil, especially when you're new, since you probably won't be leaving highsec intentionally for a few weeks anyway. (Unless you intend to immediately go pirating. Or you really really want to see the other side of the galaxy and don't want to take the extra 10 jumps to mitigate the risk of podding.)

I only use the 1mil/+1 implants since I dive into lowsec regularly and therefore need to be able to afford to replace my implants on the off chance I get podded. The profits to be had down there, once you've got a survivable setup, outpace highsec by such an incredible margin that avoiding it hardly makes sense.

I have discovered that you can blow up pirate stations for extra loot during missions.  woot.

Also, getting the learning skills to IV is a pain in the ass.

Aha!

Thanks for the tips I'll try them out

I feel it's already paid off since the lvl 4 learning skills weren't quick, and all int-based. And money, pfft. Since I've been working learning up until the last couple days, I don't need money because I can't fit crap onto my ship :) Should be able to get the 4th missile launcher on my kestrel tomorrow. Still wiping out agent I missions easily with the kestrel and up over 2.5 mil without selling any of the drops from ratting (working navy security missions). I should look for a perception implant for the war skills I'll be milking the next week or two. Slooow but I think I can get into a destroyer now if I were so inclined (I do like my kestrel though...sabertooth light missiles ftboom)

If you're taking your learning skills to 4 already then yeah you did the right thing plugging it in. Sounds like you're doing fine with cash too. If you like your frigate then maybe you can skip the destroyer stage and go directly to a cruiser once you have the skills and the cash.

Ok- stopped in at home during lunch, bought Learning 1, then started learning Iron Will 3 (figure I would do that while I was AFK). Then went to Agent of Interest to see my storyline agent, set destination, and headed out. Apologies if you try to talk to me while I am AFK- I figured I could autopilot the long flight while I was at work.

It sounds like working all the learning skills up to 4 is a good first step- should I mix in other skills as well, or just grit my teeth and do all learning?

Oh, and another thing- I think I have a crush on my ship's computer voice. She sounds really hot. Nothing like a Brit accent to make me melt. It is why I had to stop talking to Signe on TS- my wife and Righ were getting jealous!  :evil:

Signe's a brit?  Does she have a raspy smoker voice too?  If so I might have to do something drastically stupid like play EQ2 or something  :heartbreak:

I was told the following (assuming you plan to play for a good while):

Basic

Learning - 2% lower training time per level
Analytical Mind - INT
Instant Recall - MEM
Spatial Awareness - PERC
Iron Will - WILL
Empathy - CHA

First, get all these to 5, starting with INT and MEM (because INT and MEM govern the rate at which learning skills train, thus having INT and MEM at 5 hugely speeds up the process). Alternate them like so: INT 1, MEM 1, INT 2, MEM 2, etc.

Advanced

Logic - INT
Eidetic Memory - MEM
Clarity - PERC
Focus - WILL
Presence - CHA

Get these to 4, training them to 5 is unnecessary since the time cost versus benefit ratio would require you to play for about a year just to start paying for itself. Additionally, once you train your basic INT/MEM skills to 5, you may want to get the advanced INT/MEM skills to 4 right away BEFORE doing any other basic or advanced skills, just to speed the process even further.

----------

Personally, I trained stuff I wanted/needed to 1 or 2 while playing and dropped back to the learning stuff when I logged off. That way the longer skills trained over night and I could daisy-chain small skills while playing. Note, I have not got any advanced learning skills yet and thus I am probably not advancing as fast as I could be.

You have been told right. If you get sucked into EVE and assume playing longer than 1-2 months, those skills are a must be. I would look for some implants, too. In the edn, as a newbie you don't have to risk your pod (read: leave the Empire. I'm not counting getting killed by -10 pirates, because getting killed by -10 pirate after finishing your trial is fucking lame). 

The farther I get in the Player's Guide, the more impressed (and intimidated) I become. Do we have an over-arching goal for the corporation? We are small, but we have some catass types that might help us do more than more casual types. Is there any particular role that needs filling? I have a buddy from work starting tonight as well, so there will be one more drone for the hive.

Jamiko's post about the learning skills is right on. Still, I really wouldn't worry about getting them past 3 or 4 in the first month. There are a crap load of other skills you need to survive and have fun that should take priority IMO.

I got by fine for my first 3 months with learning skills at 3 and 4. I waited until I was into my first battleship before I dedicated a solid month to training them all up to 5 and taking the advanced learning skills to 4. It was incredibly boring but definitely worth it. If I didn't have a ship big enough to entertain myself with level 3 missions I'd have died of boredom.

We are trying to take over the universe, obviously.

I bought all the skills that had no or minimal requirements. They all seem to give ~+5% whatever and take only ~10-20 minutes to train (with learning 3-4 anyway).

I pretty much did what Jamiko said, with the exception that I paused when I got int/mem/learning to 4 and brought will/perc to 4. Then I went on a bit of a skill-romp, getting myself situated properly with cruisers, indys and mining stuff such that I can, on any given night, go missioning, mining, hauling or ratting as I please. Now I'm looking down the barrel of another long learning skill haul, taking my learnings up to 5 and training the advanced learnings to 3 or 4.

Only exception is empathy; I'm not using the social skillset much, and I'm mostly content with my trade skillset as is, so it's gonna get the short end of the training stick for a while.

My learning regimen follows the Eve Guide's closely: for each n, train up mem n, then int n, then learning n. I need to run the numbers through FFET's ECM, but I'm currently planning on doing the advanced stuff differently: take Mem to 5, then buy Adv Mem and take it to 3, switch to Int 5, buy Adv Int, take it to 3, train Adv Mem to 4, train Adv Int to 4, train Learning 5, then take up Will/Perc/Empathy as needed.

The reason for blitzing Mem is that I think that getting those 3 points in Adv Mem will speed up getting Int 5 sufficiently to offset or overtake the advantage of training Mem 5, then Int 5, then going into the advanced skills with a similar plan to the standard learning skills.

How much gameplay is there in EVE for some one who is really only interested in combat? I heard it totally sucks if your ship is blown up. Is there a way to stop this happening if you are a combat heavy player? Or should I just not even consider playing EVE?

If you join one of the many PvP corps you can get into combat almost immediately. You'll still need to make money to replace your ship losses but if you join one with access to 0.0 space you'll be able to go to all the best mining spots and that's very easy money. Plus, if your ship is destroyed defending your corporate  turf most established corps will replace it.

You'll be playing the cannon fodder role for a while but even in a tech 1 frigate you'll still make a real contribution during fleet battles.

I haven't bothered with any of the learning skills past level IV yet and I don't think it's worth it for most noob characters..  I'm still training all the basic combat/ upgrade stuff (Being a Minmatar means you tend to become a generalist.. some ships are armor tank, some are shield.. )  As a result I'm only just starting to hit level 4 skills that will take 10+ days to train. Previously I didn't see an advantage to it based on the bonuses Character manager was showing me.

As a concrete example, I'm training Engineering V now so I can get assult ships. Engineering uses int and memory, which I have at 15 and 12, this means it will take me 6 days 7 hours to learn from IV to V. Having int and memory at 5 and the advanced skills to even level 3 would have saved me 1d 10 hours.

 However, just training int/mem from IV to V would have taken me 7 days 3 hours each, for a total of 14 days 6 hours.  For a 1d 10h "Gain."  The min/ maxer in me says "WRONGO, no advantage there!"

Now, if I were training Battlecruisers from IV to V, that's going to take me 39 days.  Raising just one skill by 4 will shave 5 days off the training time.  That's getting closer to the time I think it would be worth it.  (Or I could do like I did to get it from 3 to 4.. set it when I cancel and there it is when I come back. Heh.)

So, is the f13 corp one of thoose ? :evil:

We don't have the resources in place yet I think.   :|

Except, the sooner that you train the advanced learning skills, the more impact they have on your entire future of skill training. Barring a freak cloning accident, you cannot lose skillpoints. Shaving off a day for a 7 day investment doesn't help with that single skill, but how many skills are you going to train in your career? Taking the advanced skills to level 4 *Will* pay off... assuming you play for more than a month or two.

The trick is to approach it from a balanced perspective, if you do nothing but train learning skills for a month and a half, you are going to be really bored when you don't have a basic skill set to equip your ships that you want to fly. Taking all of the base learning skills to 4, min/maxxing the short +5% gainers while playing and training the V's over night (especially if you don't end up playing the next day) would be an excellent way to not only increase the breadth of skills that you know, but speed up your overall character advancement.  I have not yet had my coke this morning, if this is jumbled, I appologize.

As to 0.0 access, the easiest way for a new corp to obtain access is to find an alliance that has access to 0.0 and join them (which won't necessarily be easy, as they will want you to benefit them in some way, usually territorial defense - new corps might have trouble contributing, perception or reality). But 0.0 is really a place for the self sufficient. There are no skill books, no real market, no basic equipment. Either yourself or the corp you are in needs massive amounts of trivial blueprints (ammo, basic modules, frigates, indies, cruisers, etc), the ability to get minerals to make all that trivial stuff, the ability to relocate when something bad happens, and ultimately the ability to defend your assets. And that isn't even talking about POS operation or maintaince :)  0.0 is where the game become extreemly fun, IMO. There is a barrier to entry, but it isn't insurmountable... and if you don't want to live in 0.0, taking day trips for pvp fun is easily within anyone's reach - as long as they are willing to lose whatever it is that you are flying!

With my int, I'll probably be going into research at some point.

As far as learning vs applicable skill, as I've said, I went to basic learning 4s and now I'm working enough stuff to load up my ship and grab a cruiser class ship. Then I'll dip into advanced learning for the bulk of later skill learning, when it'll save me days instead of hours. Sure, I sacrifice a few days overall, but I can actually play the game.

There's something about actually being able to play the game that calls to me for some reason. Goddamned min/maxers.

I was tempted to restart my character once I started learning how things work, but I just decided to keep plugging away.

I realized all those decisions when starting grant you skills and if you choose something with the same skill twice it gets you level 2 in that skill when you start. It is quite possible to roll up a character in the beginning with a lot of the skills you need to be able to play for a month or so while training learning skills. I have a guide somewhere for rolling up a good quality character somewhere, if anyone wants to see it I'll dig it up.

I look at my character's stats and wonder what I was thinking, but in reality I'm able to do everything I want to just fine. I started out mining and dropped that for mission running. It's nice to know I can go back to mining at any time if I choose to, and my combat skills are more than adaquate for the missions I'm getting.

EVE is definately one of those games that "the more you learn, you realize that there is even more left to learn". I'm constantly discovering new ways to do things, faster ways, shortcuts, etc. Heck just yesterday I realized you can drag and drop the modules located at the bottom of the screen so you can have the F keys the way you want them. I assumed they could not be moved.

The newbie help has a cool trick for finding agents available to you: sort the starmap by 'my agents'. Mouse over to get the lvl/qual stats. Very cool!

I started with my caldari frigate boosted, kinda wish I had taken a race setup with more perception, but I'll get over it.

Before I moved to my new house over Xmas (and ended up losing connectivity for 2.5 weeks) I rerolled my main ("Soln") to a Caldari and am just training Learning.  Almost to 4...  Haven't even left the starting station yet  :lol:

Well absolutly, but I'm thinking short-term here because all my skills have been short-duration until recently.  Adding-up the time I would have saved in training thus far I may have saved 5-6 days, total.  I only have two skills to V and one 'advanced __' skill (turrets).  I finally have all my base skills and I'm only just working things up to level IV.  After I get Assult Ships and I can have fun in those, I'll be back to long-term thinking since everything I need to train will be a IV-V or one of the tier 4+ skills that take hours just to learn level 1.

Like your mention of being effective, my min/ maxing is about having fun and playing as well as the most-efficent/ uberest path. (Which is why I'm autocannons instead of Arty. ;) )

Now then, on another note I have a question for the vets among us.  I started messing with Level 3 missions last night.  The intys in my first Deadspace mission were chewing-up my Battlecruiser enough it took me warping in and out 3 times to complete it. (The armor repairer just couldn't repair fast enough vs 3 intys and 3 missile silos.  Warp-in target the closest things / blow 2 to hell, warp out and I was already taking hull damage. )   I'm loaded-out with Medium turrets, so I can't imagine what it'd be like trying it in a Battleship with Larges that have an even smaller turning radius.  Is this usual for level 3's, or are there better ships to be trying Level 3 missions with than BCs/ BSs?  Upshot was it was my first million ISK mission (totaling rewards and bounties) and on a quality -15, so I'm planning on running them more often.

My previous corp always ran the missions with 2 or 3 people once they hit level 3's or so. The rewards/drops made it a good deal for all involved still.

Level 3s in a battlecruiser are really hard. You can do most of them but I would seriously avoid Spy Stash, The Black Market Hub, and and any of the new multipart missions that came out with the latest patch. People tell me that with very high skills you can do them in a battlecruiser but mine just weren't up to it when I tried it and I lost 2 of them before I gave up and moved back down to level 2s while saving for a battleship.

The new missions especiallly should be avoided as the inties in them will actually warp scramble you so that you can't even warp out to save yourself. I know people who've lost battleships in the new ones when they were caught by surprise.

Oh and I don't use large guns when I'm doing level 3s in my battleship. They just don't target the small fast ships well enough. With the little tacklers I often can't hit them even when I've slowed them down with a webifier and have to rely on medium drones to take them out. That's an advantage really because with medium guns my ship has loads of extra power and cpu so I can equip pretty much anything I want in the small and medium slots.

Is it advantageous to keep different/extra guns around for different missions? Maybe have some faster guns for the swarms, and some big heavy guns for missions with bigger targets (or when you have to blow a base or something)? Or is there usually an optimal build for each ship type that everyone uses?

I finally pulled my head out and unfit (unfitted?) my mining laser and replaced it with a 2nd hybrid gun I had laying around- made quite a difference in my kill rate  :-D

Missiles!

Though I'm still doing lvl 1's in my kestrel. Move along, nothing to see here.

Consider me a worker bee.  Par told me about this game, and I'm thoroughly impressed.  I'm still working my way through the tutorial, but I'm definitley hooked.  I'm an F13 n00b, so please take it easy on me.  :roll:

Abandon all hope, ye who enter here.

(http://www.fundanin.org/trotsky.jpg)

^_^

Try equipping a couple small guns and use some drones if you can. Drones seem to help me kill the smaller targets. The smaller guns are also quite useful on smaller signature targets.  Same goes for missles. Cruise missles do very little damage on frigs.

If you've got the skills a webifier will slow them down to where your guns can hit 'em.

EVE has some nice options for missions. It's just tough finding the right mix for every situation.

Thanks Schild, I was looking for an avatar.  :-D

Gax Krykhal still exists. I don't even know what race he is. The game started me off from the beginning, but I am guessing the skill points are a bit more than the usual beginning character. I am now fairly far in to the tutorial, just finished the evemail system (FILLED with corp recruitments from Sept - Dec of 2003) and am starting the combat phase.

This may be a cool change of pace.

That is about double what I started with, skills wise. Don't forget to upgrade your clone if you haven't already- the first clone only covers 30k in skill.

Excellent advice. I would never have considered it myself but the computer does chime in as you approach 60K. For 4096 ISK I have a clone that is good until I hit 240,000 skill.

The longest tutorial ever was actually fun and I thought well done. I had forgotten about this game. I had real life jump on me with both feet two years ago and before I really got started on this I quit. I am glad everyone here created a buzz that got me to look again. It is hard to keep my interest anymore but I will see if this lasts more than a few months.

http://myeve.eve-online.com/news.asp?a=single&nid=1046&tid=1

Important Announcement
This morning we have been investigating a number of account hack attempts. 57 accounts were compromised and as a result, we started full investigation and lockdown procedures. This culminated in the lockdown of Tranquility during downtime until we had finished our investigation.

As a preventive measure, to ensure account security, we have reset passwords and will send out an email to selected accounts and ask them to change their passwords.

OK- n00b question regarding skills and training and such. In the official forums, the generally advocated scheme is to train learning skills first, then train other skills  at an advanced pace (due to the bonuses from the earlier learning). The progression looks like this -


My confusion comes from the seemingly interchanging use of I and 1 to indicate a level. Are these steps talking about skill ranks or skill levels within a rank? For example, my current learning skills look like this-



If I were to follow the progression, do I take all 5 levels in rank 1 Instant Recall, or is each level a step along the way? I can't seem to find a suitable explanation on the forums.

I guess my basic question is this- is the difference between Instant Recall I and Instant Recall II 5 levels, or 1 level? Do skills go to Rank 2 (or II) after 5 levels?

Apologies if this is too n00b to believe. I am genuinely confused for some reason.

here's a noob question -- is there any limit on skills?  or is just a time sink? i.e. learn what you can in time available

Rank is independant of skill level; its just an indicator of 1x, 2x, or 3x learning time.  So a rank 1 skill might take 3 days to learn, a rank 2 will take 6 days. 

No limit on skills, as far as I know. 

Where do skill ranks come in then? Are rank 2 skills more effective? What causes a rank to go up (or down)?

WayAbvPar - The difference between Instant Recall I and Instant Recall II is 1 level. Meaning to train from I to II you have to train just one skill. There is, however, a "tier 2" memory skill that's called "Eidetic Memory" that adds even more memory, but it requires Instant Recall V. The basic idea is - get your learning skills up, get some skills for whatever you want to do (eg - mining IV and Industrial IV if you want to mine for cash) than go on and train your tier 2 learning skills for your main profession of choise (continuing with the example - if you want to mine and produce, get your tier 2 Int and Mem skills up to level III). That's about the time I quit the game. I had my initial learning skills all set up, had a Dominix (Galente Drone-based Battleship) and was doing pretty well so I decided to start on my tier 2 learning skills. 2 weeks later I was bored out of my mind of mining, got cocky, went to a Security Level 5 complex and lost my battleship because I was greedy and tried to scoop up my drones while obviously dying... Finished my learning and canceled never to come back. The moral of the story is two-fold - never fly in something you can't afford to lose, EVEN if you are SURE NOTHING WRONG CAN HAPPEN and Always, and I can't stress enough, ALWAYS INSURE YOUR SHIP.

Soln - no limit to skill. IIRC the best clone you can get is for 20 mil skill points and there are people running around with 40, though.

edit: grumble, grumble I write too slow. Rank is a measure of a skill's "difficulty". More "advanced" skills take more time to train. For example Galente Frigate from level III to IV would take 30,000 skill points (you get a Xpoints/minute while training a skill) and Gallente Battleship from level III to IV would take 150,000 skill points (numbers are totally made up)

Wolf, is you avatar hitting on me?

No limit on skills, other than you'll lose any skillpoints beyond your clone's level if (when) you're podded.   So there is a kind of 'cap' in that the most expensive clone right now hold 25.6 million skill points.  That's YEARS of skill training, though.

-Doh wolf postd this but he had the clone as smaller than it is so I'll post.

So, if I were to compare my skills (listed previously) to the list of Learning Skills to learn, I could scratch off Analytical Mind I-III, Instant Recall I and II, Iron Will I-III, Learning I and Spatial Awareness I?

I think my confusion is stemming from the fact that I see Roman numerals in some places and Arabic numerals in others, and they SEEM to me talking about the same thing- is that correct?


Still don't understand what a Skill Rank means either.

Yes and Yes. You'll get rank once you have to train a more advanced skill, it's nothing to be worried about - it's just an indication of how much time a skill would take to learn.

tazelbain - you wish. If ChineaseTvChick is hitting on anyone, that's me baby  :-D

Dude I hope you are not the jealous boyfriend type because that tramp is winking at all of us and I think that hand gesture she is making means "Two Dollar".

The rank of a skill does not change. It is set when the skill is created and *only* dictates how long it takes to train from one level to the next.

When they say 'Learning I' they mean level 1 of Learning. When they say 'Learning IV' they mean level 4 of Learning.

Ie: Train to Learning level 1, then train to Learning level 2, then train to Learning level 3, then train to Learning level 4. Now you are at Learning IV. It's not a new skill, it's the *level* you are at in that skill.

Ignore rank. All it tells you is that a skill with a rank of 2 is going to take twice as long to learn to the same level as a skill with rank 1. That's all and now I will go back to fucking my poodle. [jerk! you weren't suppose to tell anyone about my poodle fetish! - author]

Wayab, don't do anything crazy like taking your learning skills all up to 5 before you train anything else. The people on the forums that talk about doing that are usually talking about alt characters they have on second accounts. If you spend too much time on the learning skills you'll die of boredom long before the 2 week trial is up.

Just take them up to 2 or 3 and spend the rest of the time working on stuff that will let you fly better ships, do harder missions, and make more money.

Eidetic Memory is a costly skill to start - usually about 3 million ISK, although EVE Online's database says the base cost is 5 million.

IMHO it's better to train the Learning series of skills to level 4 (except for Empathy, which raises Charisma, unless you're gunning to become a top-dog trader early on), put the credits aside for a Destroyer or Cruiser, *then* save up for Eidetic Memory.

Edit: And then I read the rest of the thread and find out three people have said the same thing.  Argh, might as well make the best of this post.

Useful skills.

Engineering tree: Energy Grid Upgrades, Energy Systems Operation, Energy Management.  Gives you nice boosts in capacitor max and recharge.  Energy Management 4 is required for a handy gadget, the Micro Auxillary Power Core.

Navigation tree: Fuel Conservation, Acceleration Control, Evasive Maneuvering.  The first two are useful to pilots who use afterburners, which I imagine includes most anyway, and the last is good for all.

Gunnery tree: Rapid Firing, Motion Prediction, Sharpshooter.  Fire faster/hit fast targets easier/hit from further.  Surgical Strike is also a good combat skill, but one for later because it's relatively pricey.

Electronics tree: Long Range Targeting.

Mechanic tree: Hull Upgrades.  There's another nice gadget called Damage Control which gives bonuses against all damage types, only requires Level 1 in this skill, and should be quite affordable.

I decided to do something silly tonight to poke fun at how serious the 0.0 people are about defending their territory.

(http://www.spacebutler.com/images/oretheft.jpg)

Dear Zero Point Zero alliances,
 I'm in your base.
 I'm killing your 'roids.

18 units of obsidian ochre. Got chased across six systems on the way back to empire too. :)

Woot! We should do this some time. Really rile up them corps.

Can you tow/push asteroids around? Or did they just happen to spawn in a cluster like that?

That's what the 'roid looks like, a kind of clump of hexagonal crystals. The ship is a tiny little frigate (a Condor).

Also, the damn rocks are spread out over 450 kilometers, check out the overview.

So when f13'ers start getting killed in low sec space by 0.0 alliances, we know who to thank?  :-P

The future of this game is uncertain, the GAF dropped appreciably over the weekend. Trying to get into a cruiser and she noticed me starting Caldari Frigates V....17d....And you know...she's got a point. 17d, and that's only one of many, many skills. The early stuff wasn't bad, but it ramps up quick.

We'll see.

The question, Sky, is why are you training Firgates V?  Nothing requires it, and that exra bonus isn't worth the time invested until you're much farther along the skill tree.  Those 17 days would be better served training-up your various shield, missile, gunnery, mechanic and engineering skills to level III right now.  Hell I'm doing Level 3 missions and I only have 1 level V skill. It's simply not necessary at this point.

Yeah I have no intention of doing frigate 5 until I make the push to get into advanced ships. Even now with over 6 million skill points total there are still a ton of important skills to get first. Flying a ship without the support skills needed to do it competently is just asking for disappointment.

Daddy wants a missile platform Cruiser. I thought Frigates V was a req? Yeah...I need to work a few shield skills, but I've got a solid core of missile and engineering skills already. I did learning and those, with a couple social for $$. I'm flying a Kestrel and intend on moving into a pure missile cruiser, so gunnery is less important...I'm specializing. I like missiles.

Nope, the next tier of ship just requires IV of the tier before it.  So Cruisers require Frigs IV and Battleships require Cruisers IV.  If you're at IV you're good to start training-up cruisers.

Specializing..yeah I'm flying Minmatar, wish I could do that.  One thing to look at is the bonuses of the cruiser you're wanting to get into. Is it set-up to be an armor tank or a shield tank?  I'm having to learn all the shield skills because a Cyclone with armor tanking was viable back when I quit in August, so it was a good upgrade in-line with the skills I had for my Rifter and Rupture.  Then the RMR patch made it an awesome shield tank.. soooo.. yay for more skills to me.

My bad, you're right, I'm all set to learn Cruisers now. Woops.

Now to go make a couple mil... ;)

Get a Badger and come haul for one of the relatively-frequent mining hoedowns. We'll gather the minerals and build yer cruiser. :)

I DON'T NEED NO STEENKIN BADGER.

I mean...sounds good.

What do I need to help out? Can I slap on a big mining laser onto my frigate and be of any help? I can train my mining skill up too if that is necessary...

Hauling is probably the thing we need the most. There's a few of us who can do Miner 2's which can pull in a lot of ore - it's just that it's a pain to stop and take a full can back to the station before mining more. If there are some haulers then we can do non-stop mining for an hour and get 2-3 times more resources.

But, it seems most of the mining is happening in space other than Caldari. Which is a huge pain when trying to drive an indie around, 'cause they are real slow. If we do mining in Caldari space I have a Badger 2 someone (or I) can use to haul.

To seriously contribute to a mining op as a miner, you should be able to continuously run two Miner IIs, which can be done on a frigate; you'll need Mining 4 to fit those and a few levels of Electronics to get the CPU power; maybe Electronics Upgrades (or whatever the skill is) to fit some CPU Co-Processors to get those last few CPU points.

Above that is a mining cruiser, which can fit at least 3 Miner IIs; mining cruisers usually only require Cruiser 1, but they tend to get substantial bonuses to mining from additional points in Cruiser. The next steps above that are either a mining battleship (ridiculously expensive) or a mining barge (ridiculously skill-heavy), so ignore those until you know that you really really really really want to do a lot of mining.

The other way to contribute is by hauling the ore the miners are producing back to base. Hauling requires a cargo hauling ship and the Industrial skill (requires Frigate 3, Spaceship command 3). The entry-level Minmatar and Caldari industrials are good enough to keep up with 2-3 well-equipped miners; the entry-level Gallente one is a little too small and can just barely keep up with two well-equipped miners. I imagine the Mark 2 version (requires Industrial 2) would do just fine and the higher-ranked Gallente Industrials rapidly outstrip the cargo holds of the other races. Using instawarp bookmarks is really helpful, but how to set those up can be taught pretty quickly.

If you want to get into hauling, it costs about 750k for the skill and your entry-level ship; loans can be arranged if necessary.

The reason I've not been mining in Caldari space is that the surveying forays I've made up there have revealed a dire lack of good ore. Even in 0.5, the best rocks I've seen in Caldari space are pyroxeres and plagioclase, which are pretty much poor compared to what you can find elsewhere. Omber is the best high-sec ore I've been able to consistently find (mostly in Minmatar space), although profits can be made with kernite too (mostly in Ammatar/Amarr space). I have yet to check out Frenchy space. If someone can consistently find systems with multiple large fields (>10 rocks) of omber or extremely rich fields of kernite (>15 rocks) in Frenchy or Caldari space, I'd consider lugging my barge over there.

You won't find a lot of good ore in high-sec space, if you find any at all.  CCP is very, very aggressive about pushing people out into low sec and beyond, they want their game to be primarily PVP with the safe areas just for noobs.  It's been frustrating them (from what I can tell) that 2/3 of their population insists on hanging-out in .5 or higher.

  As a result they've been slowly stripping any benifits out of high-sec space and moving them to low-sec.  In part because the server is just too crowded in some areas, and in part because they really really want to see people PVP. It started with moving level IV agents, has moved to ore and high-bounty pirates and  they're continuing on with agents in upcoming patches I believe I read.

 Yeah, go figure, a dev company reverse-carebearing their customers. It's bizarro.  Still, unless they do something like move ALL agents above L1 Q -5 out into lowsec, with no NPC rats that give bounties or drops, you're not going to see any significant movement.  They underestimate the power of the catass and IGE to resupply folks who don't want to move.

Wow. That sucked. IE just ate my huge post.


Summary:

Eve needs capturable ships (not just destroyable) to move people out into lowsec.

Eve needs the "bartender" suggestion mechanic from Pirates! to help newbies integrate into the game.

Eve feels pretty inhuman. Tie in more human elements.

I think a large part of the problem here is that as you approach 0.0 space, the quantity of skills and equipment required to maintain break-even cashflow rises sharply, and the ability to do things solo or in small groups drops sharply. These trends arise both from the increasingly hostile NPCs and the increasingly predatory PCs. Therefore, you not only need a couple months of skilling-up in the 'kiddie pen', but you also need to have at least a handful of friends who are similarly ready and equipped to take the plunge. (This is all presuming that everyone will tolerate PVP, which is a bad assumption in regards to the population at large, but a valid one since CCP intends this to be a PVP game.)

This certainly isn't helped by the xenophobic behavior of the 0.0 hegemonies. I was chased and shot at, unprovoked, three times in the little 0.0 jaunt pictured above.  A relative noob in an unarmed (save for the tech1 ECM that I couldn't activate) noob frigate in an unaligned noob-corp attacked once on entry of 0.0 space from lowsec, once in the middle of the journey across someone's claimed space, and once on the way out of 0.0 through lowsec. All three times involved alliances large enough for me to have heard of them before. I'm not saying I was looking for a parade with flowers at my feet, but at least being convo'ed and told to get the hell out would've been less hostile than being silently chased across the stars.

(I was expecting to get chased and shot at, that was kind of the whole idea of the journey, but I'm still a little shocked at their tenacity.)

Yep and muggins here was one of the poor unfortunates who had all their ISK stolen

Yes I changed my password once I got the email (Friday night)
No I didnt change it back to what it was originally

and I still got raped by some asshole on Saturday morning. Reports are that the old passwords still worked...........

It's perfectly normal. Big Alliances are very afraid of being spied on by other big alliances. That's the whole point of the "if you're in our space we shoot at you" politics. You would've been shot at, even if you were in a shuttle, especially since you were in forsaken territory. They don't like anyone. I remember my fun trip to 0.0, back when I was en-route to joining FIX. Some friends from a FIX Corp met up with me in Khanid, and we all went down to Querious where they showed me around. We went around for about an hour, while they were showing me their POSes and a station they took over, cool places to rat and mine, we met about 10 different patrols while we were there and I almost got shot twice, saved only by "DON'T SHOOT HE'S WITH US!!!!1111". And I was in a fucking shuttle :P I think the coolest thing I saw while I was there was the gate on the border of FIX's claimed space. There was a HUGE "FIX" written with secure containers above the gate - awesome :)

edit: thank god for "spell check". Almost makes my posts readable

Actually, I love it - the dev knows what they want their game to be and how they want it to work. They stick with it, and don't really put up with illogical crying - "If you don't like it, leave."

At least they have some balls. What's a shame is that they don't have a box on the shelves (that I could find). I saw a bunch of stupid EQ boxes, but no EVE.  :|

I'm going to disagree slightly with your assertion here. You can do mine in any system with 3 people as the minimum, and only 1 of those needs decent skills. (NPC Tanker/Defender who needs good skills, miner of any skill level, hauler of any skill level). I've been out in 0.0 for over a year and a half now, and I went out to 0.0 with under 2 mil skill points (although I could fly an interceptor then). I was able to contribute to the alliance I was in and make money in various ways, although the main way I made money was to be a loot whore for my friends who were NPC'ing from long range and couldn't be bothered to go loot their cans with their slow ass battleships.

Hrm, I guess it depends on if you consider 3 people a small group or not; which I do. You can always add more mining lasers to any operation when you already have the basics established. What you will find in 0.0 from established players is that they have become very self sufficient in many ways. Specifically in my corp that I am in right now, almost everyone has 2 accounts (A PvP/NPC account and an industrial/mining account). With these two accounts you can mine solo with some risk (kill the NPC's, switch ships and mine - ready to warp out when the NPC's respawn).

PvP'ing can provide a decent income solo if you keep at it. You can kill indies with the most basic of T1 frigs, but you are on the bottom of the food chain when it comes to combat ships so you will have to learn how to run. Interceptors provide good running ability, as well as good killing power for the frigate level of ships. It all depends on what you want to do.

/end ramble

You all twisted my arm.  GD these downloadable games and the lure of instant gratification. 

My character's name is "False Fable."  (Mesozoic was taken, somehow).  Seems pretty cool, but I'm still in the impressionable newbie period.  I do like how easily the game plays in a window, it bodes well for getting other things done while "playing."  I'm still in the tutorial -  the server went down for daily maintenance this morning when I was going to finish it. 

Eve's a cool game. But I don't see myself participating much in the best part of the game, because we're not in some mega-alliance, we don't have the cashflow to even bother trying to hang out in 0.0, and probably never will, because we're not really that kind of gamer. Well, I'm not. Catass to pvp on an uneven playing field sucks monkey cock, no matter how cool the game or ideas are.

Losing a ship is bad enough, but the fact that you'll probably get podded and lose implants is regoddamndiculous. But hey, some people need their balls crushed to have fun in multiplayer games. Me, I'm happy if the game is just fun and my balls are nice and uncrushed. If that makes me a carebear (despite my love of early UO, Planetside, BF1942, Unreal, UT, etc etc ad nauseum), so be it.

And hell, 0.0? I was in my kestrel running a mission two jumps into 0.3 and got jumped several times. I mean, I expect it...but it's really kind of like jumping miners in UO. Where's the fun if the other person isn't interested in fighting? Luckily they weren't very good and I warped out of there, and I'd only lose my kestrel and fail my mission. So some gate-camping jackass can have his fun. This game is pretty much all about the uber alliance or catassing to high skill levels, the vets will always have the advantage on newer players, due to the way skills are handled. And that's just not a formula for a good pvp game.

Vets will always have more skill points than you it's true but all that means is that they'll be able to do more things well than you. If you decide to be an expert fighter in a cruiser you can be as good as any veteran at doing that in a few months. The veteran you kill may have 10 million skill points but it's not like he can bring them all into play while he's fighting you.

Hopefully, you won't give him a 10 minute break during the battle in which to dock and come back with his battleship. :)

If the F13 corp actually holds together long enough there's no reason you can't join a 0.0 alliance in a few months when you're all stronger and richer.

I don't think it's possible to catass in this game.  Yoru, me, straz and some other guy(tm) went all the way down to 0.1 last night to test out Straz's new ship that was built as the result of corp efforts.  We had a pretty good time.  I think it's just a matter of finding some good people to hang out with like every other mmorpg.

Reading here and elsewhere, its pretty clear to me that I'm going to need to start a new character.  I want to do combat, hanging out in a frigate for a while and then evenutally sizing up to cruiser.  From a conceptual point of view, the ability to cloak sounds nice, but I have no idea if a cloaking combat frigate / cruiser is feasible or even possible. Can anyone give me some character development advice, or point me towards a good guide?

IMHO there is little need to start a new character- you can learn to do anything and everything eventually. Common wisdom is to train your learning skills (attribute increasers and Learning) up as soon as possible, since they reduce the training time of all the other skills (a significant benefit later on down the line). Mix in things like Engineering, Electronics, Gunnery, Mechanic, etc will help you build a character that can pimp out the lower level frigates enough to be able to start making some money.

And always ALWAYS did I mention ALWAYS remember:
DON'T BUY ANYTHING UNLESS YOU CAN AFFORD TO LOSE IT AND SHRUG IT OFF.

I don't think I see what you mean.

From the eve forums, it sounds like that if you want to cloak get a covert ops ship rather than doing it half ass.

Goddamn I have been wavering my mouse over the re-sub button for the last ten days every other day or so.

This comment almost pushed me over the edge:

I really want to re-sub and just log on to train skills for the next month whie I wait for WoW's shiney to wear off.  But I have this realist side that says if you do that you'll either end up staying with WoW or comming back to EvE to find everyone is left and it really is not a solo friendly game for people who are solo because they dont like playing with randoms not because their online handle of choice is xXxLoneWolfSniper69 or somesuch bullshit.

I subbed for 3 months, so you will have me to kick around at least until April. Come on back and check it out!

Yeah, I was expecting to get shot at and chased since I'd read about the Shoot To Kill policies and such. I was just saying that it doesn't exactly project the sort of "come down and try out 0.0, the water's fine" image that would be necessary to get a larger portion of people to give it a shot. It feels a lot more like "this is our playground, you stay out or else", and that's an attitude that raises hackles for me. Maybe it's just my inner Che bubbling up, but when an uberguild presents itself and says "obey or else," my first reaction is to consider kicking 'em in the jimmy.


I consider 3 to be a sufficiently small group, although what would the NPC tanker/defender need? A lone carrier takes several minutes to blow up a battlecruiser-class rat, so I'd expect he'd either need to be in a battleship or a battlecruiser. I'd still be hesitant to bring a mining barge into lowsec under that small of an escort though, since the damn things align and taxi so slowly; a cruiser mining boat, though, would do fine.

Given the success of our ratting group last night, I'll agree that you can certainly head down to lowsec in groups of 2-4 combat boats and have a fine time so long as you don't jump into anything extremely nasty (multi-battleship gatecamps come to mind). Even spawns of 3 battlecruisers or 2 battlecruisers and 2 destroyers were no match for our little group.

As for two accounts, that's a level of dedication and catassery that I'm unwilling to cross.

A question for you 0.0 folks, though; what sort of commitments do the 0.0 alliances demand? I find that the thing that'll turn me away from these worldy-type games is maintenance; I mind grinding minerals/money a lot more when it's going towards treading water rather than some goal. And the dead last thing I want to get roped into is mandatory patrols or mining - the instant someone says 'mandatory', it stops being a fun game and starts being a second job.

A-fucking-men. That is part of what drove me away from Shadowbane.

I am hoping to get my frigate outfitted well enough to come play with the big boys soon- I am still tinkering and finding out what I like and don't like, what works and doesn't, etc. Of course, by the time I get it all figured out it will be time to move up to the next class of ship  :x

On another topic altogether- anyone else enjoying the Tractor Beam BPO fiasco (http://myeve.eve-online.com/ingameboard.asp?a=topic&threadID=277103) as much as I am? I think it is fucking hilarious.

It was fun.

--some other guy(tm)

I couldn't remember your board name.  :|

The more I think about it, the more I realize if I were to go on to PVP and low-sec space it wouldn't be as a member of a corp.  I'd much rather be involved in a small corp of mercs or bounty hunters than play the whole catass of nations game.  That's fun to me, playing patrol the gate for 8 hours isn't.

Hey WAP, I believe I will be hooking up my free 2 week trial soon.  What do I need to know if I want to find you in-game (and if you want to be found, natch) and what are some good boards/resources for the EVE n00b?

We use the 'f13' channel in-game, and there are corp offices scattered around in Gallente and Caldari space. Don't know if there are others (?). You can check out the official EVE boards, as they have a pretty good amount of info (including a "most advantageous" skill progression thread in the Skills forum).

Since I have these massive 18 posts on this board I find your story implausible. I have been insulted sir. My seconds shall caontact your seconds that we may find satisfaction in manly combat. :)



Minmatar has an office on Onga VIII, I forget the moon but it is the one with the Imperial Armament Factory.

Question:  How crowded is 0.0 space?  Are there well estabished borders between alliances through all the arms of the galaxy, or are there also big empty chunks of no-mans-land?  The idea of F13 carving out its own little corner of space sounds nice, but not so feasible with our small numbers.

For any other n00bs like me:  Someone pointed this site out to me ingame the other day, good for deciding on a 'goal' ship to work for.  Or even a race, if you're some kind of freak who keeps switching between race ship skills every other day  :-)  http://destabiliser.com/eveships/

Edit:  What the hell does POS means.  Every time I see it I think Piece of Shit, but that aint right.

According to the eve-offline.net map (http://www.eve-files.com/media/corp/CRII/Latest.jpg), someone claims (at least nominally) pretty much everything in zerosec. Whether or not those huge claims are tightly controlled or largely empty, I don't know.

POS = Player Owned Station, referring both to buildable/conquerable starbases in zerosec and the deployable space structures that go up around moons in lowsec; these latter types can be put up in 0.7 and below now due to the RMR update.

Huh.  I'm really curious to see how enforced those borders are. 

And damn, people, think up some more interesting Alliance names. 

From the thread:  http://ccp4tw.ytmnd.com/

That's awesome.

some of those areas are freaking huge. I don't see how you could conceivably patrol them with even 1000 people in your alliance.

Ooooh really? Maybe we should scout out a good 0.7 sector and work towards putting a POS there. If we can use it as a gateway into lower sec space and carve out our own little pleasure palace...

I tried reading that... it was like they were all commenting on an article that didn't exist, or something.  It made no sense. 

Alkiera

That is a good plan. Get a border area we can use for a base camp and expand from there.

Can we get our own board yet? can we? can we? can we?

 :-D

Basically, CCP said in the patch notes preview that they were going to increase the price of the Tractor Beam BPO to  15 million to put it more in line with the prices of the materials needed to construct it. A bunch of people ran out and bought tons of them in anctipation of phat profits when the price went up (I think they were really cheap, like 81k or something). CCP then changed their mind before the patch went live, and rescinded the price change, sticking all the insider traders with basically worthless BPOs (they can't be resold to NPCs).

The people who tried to weasel the system got fucked, which brings tears of joy to my eyes.

Ginger Magician bitching about that is the funniest thing to me, ever.  You see, Ginger is a punkass dual-account gatecamper who hangs out in Minmatar space, usually the Resbroko or other .5->.4 gate in Metropolis.  He's the only guy to have ganked me in the game, and he's caught me in a few places.  He has one BS set-up as the sniper and the other as the targeting drone.  Any bounty put on him that's high enough he pods himself and pockets.  A douchebag of the highest order so I laugh, and laugh and laugh at his misery.

Ahh, I see.  yah, kinda funny.  And BPO... Blueprint...  Object?  I never got the 'put letters in the middle of words into their acronyms' thing.  Another gotcha, these days, most blue prints aren't blue.  Weee!

Alkiera

That was an idea I had too.


Blueprint Original

Blueprint Originals. From BPOs you can make Blueprint Copies (BPCs) which you can sell. You use BPOs to research and stuff to make even better BPCs that will build faster and use less resources than the BPO calls for. All of the BPCs you see on the Escrow market are made from BPOs.

Oh I have no problem with it, I just find it weird in the way it's opposite of all prior examples.


Control is easy since there's only so many ways into each sector.  Not sure if you pod people as they enter or as they leave, or if you can forcibly uncloak someone, but that's how it's done.

As the game gets more and more popular they're going to have biiiiig problems, though. (and not just the 'omgwtf everyone's stressing 1/3 of the server cluster' problems.)  The community has stayed small enough that people recognize each other and even the asstards have their place.  As it's started gaining popularity, the smacktards have started to filter in and hang around. If the game gets large enough it'll be a glorious clusterfuck where these hegemonys will have to contract or be on 24/7 a-la Shadowbane.

 Hell, even an infusion of just a few people can cause problems.  There's a whole corp of SA Goons that just started up and it's my understanding they're causing a few older alliances grief by being a nuisance and claiming their own space.  Theyv'e been largely ignored thus far because the major folks in the area they claimed are feuding with each other and too distracted with old problems.  I imagine they'll be large and experienced enough to REALLY be a thorn in the side by the time both groups turn around and pay attention.   One of the Corp guys is in this group and was talking about how they've already financially drained one corp who did try to take them on.  Sheer numbers and zergs of tier 1 cruisers and frigs later, and that corp is sending tier 1 stuff against them because they'd lost so many tier 2 battlecruisers and battleships. Whoopsie.

From my research, you want to think long and hard about a POS. It's a large initial investment (well over 100 million isk, even for the smallest stations) for what I hear is a relatively mediocre payoff (moon mining), and stations in 0.4 and above consume additional fuel (charters) as well as the already-large quantities of ice products. The ice products require guys in mining barges with ice mining, and I don't think anyone in F13 proper has a barge. I'm not sure how many hours of ice mining are required, but I imagine they're significant. (Ugh, maintenance!)

(Aside: I do have a barge and I'd bet that at least some of the Eve vets around here have one. They require about 2 weeks of training if you've gotten your learnings up; the lion's share of that goes into Industry 5.)

In highsec, the payoff isn't all that hot; in lowsec, you can get some benefit by finding a rich system with no starbase and setting up a corp hangar, warehouse and maybe a refinery.

Pssh we already have 700k ISK, what's another 999.3mil ISK?

By looking at the updated f13 roster someone sent out yesterday, it seems that quite a number of people here are playing.

From what I know, we have a couple of cruisers (Yoru and I both have heavily-armed Caracal missile cruisers) and a smattering of people in frigates, who could very quickly get up in ability to the lighter cruisers, and a handful of good miners.

I won't rule out the possibility of setting up shop somewhere in a LowSec system. It also might not be a horrible idea to talk to some people from "that other site," though I personally have no relationship with them.

I would be perfectly happy controlling just a single complex at a moon. It would be OUR moon.

The funny thing is that they're both tightly controlled AND largely empty. Alliances only control the choke points and patrols inside are only around the border systems.

Someone mentioned he'd never want to be in an alliance because he'll have to camp gates and be on patrol. Now I'm talking from my experience (and it's not a lot) with one alliance, but iirc FIX didn't have obligatory patrols. Whenever you felt like it, you just went to the QDF (Querious Defence Force or something) channel and ask for an assignment. In a time of war, of course, you were supposed to have a battle ready ship very close to you and be ready to defend the life of all fixians :P

Someone (I think Yoru) said 0.0 is highly unaccessible. While that's true, the whole idea of ISS' Outposts is to make it accessible for empire players. Most of the alliances are pretty scared by them, but the economic opportunity to have empire players bring down resources and modules swung them at the end. I'm guessing that at some point ISS would get some strong PvP support (their pvp wing is a joke) and they'll try to take both pure blind and catch and announce them free for all and have the forces to keep peace :) But of course, that's me speculating.

If you really want to go through with your POS idea PLAN it very Carefully. And location is pretty much everything. I guess almost everywhere will be equally difficult, but FOR THE LOVE OF ALL THAT IS HOLY DON'T BUILD IT NEAR THE RUSSIANS. Anybody you can reason with. Except the Russians.

The ISS is one of a small handful of neutral options to getting access to zerosec that I've seen. Thing is, the more I look at POSes, the more and more unfriendly they look. Ice mining, high consumption rates of fuel, large initial investment, and (the one that really sticks in my craw) trade-good fuels that have to be hauled out from empire. :x Pretty much every aspect of zerosec looks quite unfriendly to non-catass play. You have to have a manufacturing, defense, hauling and mining setup up-front, then you need blueprints to rebuild stuff you use or lose (probably BPOs, which need researching), and the personnel to keep the whole logistical works running. If any of you hardcore zerosec folks see me online at some point, convo me - I want to pick your brains on the details of living out there.

Really, I need to sit down with the market screen and a stack of paper to work out the whole cost of setting up a sustainable operation... I just hope it doesn't involve partial derivatives or anything that complex. ;)

And yeah, the worst thing would be getting it all done and leaving the Russian station, half-drunk on cheap vodka, only to have your ship explode when you get back in the pod and try to rev up the engine.

I just got my barge on my main and it will be about a week on my mining alt (industry 5 is a bitch!) but I dont have any ice mining stuff at present.

That and I'm still head of my corp from start of retail (consisting of just my buds) so I'm not a member of F13 - not that I'm opposed to helping out but I can see GMT being an issue

Just to cover another point - I'm already in cruisers (I'm Caldari, dont know what the humorous nickname for them is I'm afraid) but my combat skills are pretty pants (medium hybrids, heavy missiles bugger all else) as I tend to only solo hunt NPC frigs or group hunt solo NPC cruisers (and their frigate escort) when they can/could be found in 0.4-ish space (thing they've been moved lower now)

There are two ways to group mine in low sec/0.0 space. You either find a sufficiently small NPC spawn (say 4 cruisers and a frig or two) and warp your Battleship/Cruiser in and wait for them to all start firing at him. The battleship sits there and tanks it (he needs good cap recharge and decent resists) everyone else warps into the belt and mines under the tankers protection. NPC's do not change targets once they begin to shoot at a target, thus this way is flawless (from NPC's) as long as your tanker can soak the damage.

The second way is to have a defender either in the belt or in the system clearing rats. You find a belt you want, send in the defender and he clears it of rats. Everyone warps in, with the miners paying particular attention to pointing their ship at a celestial object (Although they need to remain stationary in order to mine). When NPC's respawn, all of the miners need to watch their overview for the Red Crosses, and when they do spawn the miners need to warp to the celestial object they are pointed at. The Defender warps in, clears the spawn and rinse-repeat. This has a higher level of risk to the miners (although in .1+ space this risk is minimal) but the later way is a bit more of a deterrent for causal player pirates.


0.0 alliances demand various things, so you will have to research the various ones. I'm second in command of a 0.0 alliance right now (Vertigo Coalition - we don't claim any space) and I used to be fairly high up the command structure of the Fountain Alliance (although I was always trying to change it to the ways it needed to be, not one of the old bloods that ruined that alliance due to their inability to change.... .but that is neither here nor there :p), and we don't really have many rules. We only really recruit PvP corps, although some of the corps that are in our alliance do have a strong carebear streak in them to make their money. Other alliances will have various demands, FA was notorious for weekly patrols, others will jus insist that if the space the alliance claims is "invaded" that everyone pitch in to help. While some people might not want to fight, helping out in these usually epic struggles are really what helps to define Eve.

Additionally, 0.0 is there to who can take it. Yes, there are large parts of space claimed by various entities, but it is largely empty. I took my corp into space claimed by an enemy, and now we control the system and a few jumps in every area, regardless of what the map says about who controls the space. The trick to 0.0 is simply this: 0.0 exists for those who wish to reside there. Any attacker, no matter how persistant cannot force someone to leave until they are willing to settle the area (now, they can reduce the play time of the defenders significantly for their stay).

Yes.
This sounds like fun.
Alliance?

And they say player driven content doesn't work.  Tell me this doesn't sound more interesting then the most well designed raid or quest from any EQ-clone.

Mmm, "just take it"... that fans the flames of the rebel deep inside. I may have to do more of those foolish zerosec expeditions to scout out 'controlled' territory.

Convo or evemail me ingame, I'd like to chat with you about what's necessary for living in zerosec so I can plot out the costs of establishing down there.


Formal Alliances cost 1 billion and require the empire control skill at 5 (for the CEO of the founding corp) to start, and 1 million per week per corp to maintain. There's always informal alliances, of course, but then you don't get the nifty toys.


 :heart:

I'm Coug in game - I've been idling in the f13 channel to answer questions when I'm paying attention. Just shoot a convo when you see me in there, although I probably won't be around till Thursday.

OUCH!

and they wonder why so many people are macro mining or buying ISK off ebay......

Umm just so everyone knows, you need to cancel your sub its auto-reoccuring.  Apparently I've been sub'd to EvE for a long time now..  I should check my cc bills more often apparently.

So anyways, I canceled but I'm d/l'ing the client, what a strange week this has been.


*edit*

Ok so my character's name is Elseix, 1.834million skill points (no sense of how many that is, and time played doesn't help because like I said above I forgot to unsub last time I pop'd back into EvE).

I'm qualified to fly Amarr Crusiers or Battlecruisers, although I currently only have a pair of Omen cruisiers which was the cheapo one back in the day.  I also have a lvl1 Amarr hauler (the best lvl1 if I remember right) which has 8.8k cargo but I could easily upgrade the expanders I'm sure.

I do have 106million isk, which is a nice thing, I think I forget how expensive things are.

So yeah, I'm going to need to collect all the random junk I have floating around, prob liquidate it into resources and move to whatever area you guys are flying in.  I need the following information.

What should I fly?
Where should I go?

I happen to be sitting in The Forge atm but I think last time I was playing I was just running a complicated series of npc and pc assigned hauling and I lost the paperwork for my route, so no reason to be here compared to anywhere else.

Hey your elsixe, we tried talking to you but you were mute.

If you're in caldari stay put unless you want to join the mining crew in heimatar.

Few things:

1) 0.0 space is dangerous.  "Newb Corp" ships and other unknowns are generally assumed to be alts for hostile alliances.  When things are quiet, someone on patrol may take the time to talk to you, more likely they'll just lock you up and shoot you because you don't belong there.  When there's any kind of hostilities (most of the time), they won't hesitate, they'll just kill.  They'll pod you on principle because frequently the point of newb corp alts is simply to spy, and a pod can do that as well as a ship.  Even in an alliance, outside of your own space where you can and can't be is subject to the tides of diplomacy and the whims of trigger-happy patrol commanders.

2) 0.0 space is *profitable*.  Zydrine and Megacyte (3-5K isk per unit, 100 units to an m3) can be found in low-sec (0.1 to 0.3) space, but they are in much greater concentrations in 0.0 (and not as mined-out).  Morphite (around 16-20K isk per unit) can only be found in 0.0.  0.0 npc spawns can be worth several million each in bounties alone, and routinely drop named modules worth hundreds of thousands to tens of millions.  Some 0.0 complexes can yield *billions* in "faction" loot (modules better than Tech 2) each time they are run.  Moon mining POS's can also yield zydrine, megacyte, and morphite, as well as containing refining complexes to process ore from regular mining (NPC stations with refineries can be few and far between in most 0.0 regions).

3) Even comparative newb characters can be useful to an alliance.  Fleet ops always need tacklers (light ships equipped with warp jammers and stasis webs to keep targets from warping away), a "poor man's covert" (a frigate with a cheap cloak) is a useful source of intel, and for ordinary patrols and raids T1 cruisers (or anything with target painters, webs, or scramblers) are always helpful.  *Anyone* can haul ore with minimal Industrial skill investment, and haulers generally get a full share on a mining op (which generally comes to millions per hour).

Eve in 0.0 space is a totally different game than Eve in Empire, a much more complex and interesting one.  Yes, you expect to lose a lot of ships and get podded a lot.  But if it were easy, everyone would do it.  And yes, if the f13 corp is interested, I can put you in touch with the people in FIX who deal with corporation recruitment, or see about getting individuals into either ImpTech or one of our close allies.

--Dave

I just want to blow things up. Is that too much to ask?

Colour me impressed.  This game is getting richer with every extra reading. 

That might be a good way to go. Hopefully we can get a consensus as a corp to do something like that. Will being in an alliance put us in any more danger than being an unknown n00b corp?

Yes and no.  Yes, because alliances have enemies, and sometimes those enemies will declare an Empire War, or pay mercenaries to do so, which will mean that Concord won't do anything if you get jumped by them in Empire (sometimes opportunist pirates will as well, but usually they wind up regretting that).  No, because at least in that alliance's space, you only have to worry about enemy raids and opportunists, and the alliance has your back.  And outside of it, you'll usually know where you stand, although that's never certain.

If you really don't like the idea of PvP, you shouldn't get into a 0.0 alliance, because you *will* be under considerably higher threat of it.  If you take getting podded personally, you'll get pretty frustrated.  Like I said, if it was easy, everyone would do it.

--Dave

The only worry I have about joining an alliance is two fold:

 - Time Requirements (are we required to patrol? watch gates?)
 - Money Requirements (how much are dues? how often?)

Since #1 can quickly kill a game for a new player, I'm very adverse to any 'have-to's. And, obviously, #2 is in short supply with a new corp.  :roll:

I've had my eye on zerosec for a while now and I'm all hot on moving out there once the basics needed for survival are in place.

Basic financing is 1m/week base, although I expect some alliances charge more to cover operating costs.

If the alliance controls one or more outposts or conquerable stations, it might be possible to live out of one while the gap between 0.0 survivability and viable POS stewardship is overcome.

Different alliances handle the time commitment and finance issues differently.  FIX has a head tax, and rebates against it for killmail participation (and for a fortified POS or capital ship, Dreadnought+).  You're also expected to show up for a major alert, and there's a bit of battle fatigue right now for the sheer number of them we've had in the SA war for Catch.  The tax isn't too tough to pay, most corps have managed to completely earn out on rebates this month with all the fighting.  Beyond that, it's mostly just that you're expected to supply your own ships for fleet ops, the alliance will help you replace it and the modules if you lose it in a fleet op.

--Dave

OOOhhh.. you're the guys fighting the Goon Squad?  Ow, sorry about that.

I am a super-noob (just over 20 days) but Mahrin is making this sound like a real blast.  My issue would be a time comittment, given my busy schedule, but of course if I am logged in and my corp or alliance needs something I can do I will report for duty... for as long as I can.  I am not able to sustain a battle for many consecutive hours.

Given my concentration, I will probably be most useful for mining or hauling.  I am still working on lv5 basic int and mem skills, next will be lv5 mining and refining sets and enough ship skill to at least fly a cruiser.

Fix is sounding nice, but I just want to make doubly sure that 'expected to show up' only applies if you're already in-game and doing something else.

You never can tell with MMO uber-organizations.

I'm all for joining a 0.0 alliance FWIW.

It's interesting how similar EVE is to early UO.

Sky - you could play a ore thief. You can just trade reagents between cities to make money. You can be a macro miner. You need to sit in your cabin to wear off your aggression timer. People have friends kill them when their bounties get high enough. You will get ganked. You will lose everything. But - there are warnings that say - There be PK's here!

I have been thinking about this for a bit, reading it somewhere before Furiously stated it, and it seems very true.  There are two big differences, though: I don't suck so much at EVE, and EVE has more things to do right out of the gate.  I am not really geared, still flying frigates and poorly I might add.  I am decidedly not good at EVE, and yet I feel like I have more power over my fate than in UO.  I am pleasantly surprised that I am actually enjoying a game with open PvP.

People can kill your pack animals too. Except in Eve the pack animals have afterburner!

Eve is different from UO in that Empire Space is big enough to enjoy the early game with relatively low risk. In UO, you literally couldn't leave town without SOME risk, and any known hunting ground was really asking for trouble.

The similarity is that there are great rewards to be had either killing the PKs, or by risking their wrath to trade/mine/rat in the low sec systems. I really hated PKs in UO at first, but I ended up missing them. The older I get, the more pro PvP I get. I realize now that the only true test of my skills is against another player.

Hrm, suppose if you guys are going to look into FIX I'll have to put you to -10 as well  :evil:

I actually really like the FIX guys, but politics (their friendly kissy kissy relationship with BoB namely) makes my organization desire to shoot at FIX. /shrug

Hey Dave, just curious, how is that war with SA comming along? I heard you're close to losing Catch and that SA are very, very pissed at you for some reason.

And what is up with Serpentis attacking BoB? Do CCP feel like they are too powerful? I feel that that is something pretty major, never heard of devs messing around in-game with player guilds/alliances. Didn't that tip the scales so G and Iron managed to push them south? I mean I heard there was a Carrier and a ton of Battleships. And why BoB and not RA, as far as i can tell from outside the game RA are causing a lot more trouble than BoB. I'm asking because I know BoB and FIX are close and you might know something from FIX's uba sikrit forums that you wouldn't get kicked off from sharing :)

Sorry for bombing you with a thousand and one questions, but that part of the game fascinates me.

I hate to say it (as you know if you read my posts you know I  :heart: me some pvp) but I think that jumping to the 0.0 alliance game might be a little premature.  Better to get some basic pvp tactics worked out, get comfortable with ship setups and recognizing common ship builds strengths/weaknesses not to mention just skilling up might be prudent before we make the plunge.

Eventually the joy of empire space will wear off, which is usually when I take a break from EvE (but keep paying for it, doh) at which time the corp will be more fleshed out and have more assets in the bank and it would make perfect sense to have a go at joining the big dogs.

In short, while I think getting involved in the 0.0 side of the game should certainly be the goal and something we should always be getting ready for, I think trying to get into it right away would be a mistake.

I agree with what you say and I think this is all just brain storming at the moment.

The SA War: I can't say too much, simply because a lot of it I don't know.  We got knocked back on our heels by the initial attacks, especially when we were fighting Huzzah, SA, Cosmic Fusion, and the x13 mercs all at once, and all alone (outnumbered about 3 to 1 at that point).  Now Triad is raising hell in SA's rear area (for their own reasons, Triad isn't really what you could call friendly to anyone), Cosmic Fusion and x13 are out of it (actually, x13 is now fighting SA, I'm not sure why, maybe a contract dispute?), and we're getting more agressive about our ops, so it's back to a tossup.  SA tried to make a major push in FAT over the weekend, and the lag-monster ate them, which seems to have broken their momentum for now.  So they hold both of the mining support stations in central Catch, and we're holding on to the FAT station.

FIX and BoB kind of have to be close, as we share too much border, either we get along or we fight to the death (which probably would go badly for FIX, BoB is *huge*, we couldn't take enough turf away from them to threaten their existence even if we could win the battles).  No way we could kill BoB without allying with someone like G or IRON, and we really don't like them.  As it is, we have mutual transit rights, and BoB would probably step in if someone were threatening our core in Querious (they definitely wouldn't want SA in there, as they'd undoubtedly start casting covetous glances towards BoB's two southern regions).

Overall, the total value of shipping lost is probably equal (which works against us, SA has deeper pockets and greater numbers).  It's still a tossup.  Fatigue is definitely a factor for FIX right now, but it looks like it's starting to get to SA also.  Having lost the obvious momentum works against SA, it makes it easier for us to get support and harder for them.

I have no idea what's up with BoB, although I know they ate that carrier up pretty good.

--Dave

The Serpentis/BoB thing is pretty simple, yet altogether not clear. Seeing as this is an open board I won't talk too much about what I know... but whatever.

What we (VC) know about Serpentis' goals (ie the storyline CCP is currently working on, or steering towards) is that they are somewhat annoyed that there are so many people "claiming their space" (a fairly... simplistic attitude for a NPC corp to take). VC was brought into some discussions with one of their admirals, also present was FA, I believe CELES, and later on someone from FA brought in an IRON/G rep. Discussions basically went "BoB is the greater evil" and we got Serpentis and IRON/G to kiss and make up (IRON/G had taken part of an earlier Serpentis Event where they were shooting Serpentis). VC's stance is a bit muddled, as the leaders of the alliance aren't sure what we feel about CCP intervening in 0.0 politics, and how would we feel if the dev's teamed up with our enemies to push us out? Because of that, VC is taking a laize-faire approach to Serpentis support and are leaving the choice to support Serpentis or not up to the individual pilots of VC.

As to why they attacked BoB in Delve (note that Delve is a Blood Raider territory - but it IS BoB's home region, as close as they have to a home), I don't know. The Serpentis force wasn't nearly big enough to handle the size of BoB (they are a notoriously fast respondant to incursions of scale), they didn't give the various supporting factions enough forewarning (CELES was the only faction there in any numbers)... and just overall seemed to be ineffectual by any means.

It is very interesting to me about how my alliance is reacting to this event -- it is an Event, which should be encouraged, as there are few MMO's that invest in this. But those who share this opinion do have some point... they have touted 0.0 as the playground for player politics, and to have events that are themed around changing the political landscape (if successful) seem to be a bit contrary. It *IS* CCP's world, and they obviously have free reign... I'm decidedly undecided on the issue myself.

...er that ran long, I'm going away now.

Whoa. It was said before and I second it again, player created content CAN work. I am impressed. Time to skill up, I want some piece of the action. :evil:

Totally agree we don't have the skills and won't for several months to try and tackle 0.0 space.  I do think we should look at .3 space or so right now.

I'd just like some clarification:

SA = SomethingAwful? They have an EVE corp? And why are they starting trouble, whoever they are?

Also, on an unrelated note, if I was in an alliance, would I be "allowed" to focus solely on combat? I don't much like trade runs or mining.

I found some nice spots last night for mining/base camping- Hek and Hror. They were nearly deserted .5 spaces with low sec nearby for mining/ratting excursion. Hror had a ton of omber rocks waiting for us as well. Only a few jumps from Onga too, so they aren't THAT out of the way.

Yes, SA= Something Awful, aka. Goonfleet.  (http://www.goonfleet.com/)  They're 'starting trouble' because they moved into 0.0 space to set-up shop.  Since about all of 0.0 is "Claimed" (even if there's no stations to 'hold' it.) they were going to rub SOMEONE the wrong way, since (apparently) they didn't want to swear fealty to any of the exsisting Alliances out there.


 
If you're going to the Hek, Hror area just hit-up Amo in the Metropolis region... because I'm lazy and don't want to move all my stuff when lending you all assistance.  :-D

  I like it because it's a .5 right next to several .4 zones, close to the Heimatar region, but less crowded, and the base I'm out of (Republic Fleet I think.. it's the last one on the list) has  has a nice quality 1 agent and a L2 who's only -6, (Security for combat missions)  It's also only one jump from Research/ Manuf. and 3 jumps from a university school in Nakuguard (important for buying books). 

Yoru's crew is going to be joining us in the corp, and they are doing ops around Mehatoor, which is 8? jumps from Onga. From Mehatoor you have a bunch of 0.2 and 0.3 systems to do low-sec ops in. The jumps from Onga to Mehatoor are all high-sec, so no worries when travelling between the two.

We will be setting up an office in Mehatoor for those guys and I'll check out the nearby systems. It sounds like it might be a good area to start dabbling in low-sec operations and maybe even eventually a player owned station to increase refining for the mining we do.

The only downside to that area is there's a finite number of low-sec systems, and no entrance to 0.0 space. (Which is probably fine for now, we can also move to another system when we are ready for that).

Actually the SA Dave and I were refering to was Stain Alliance - a knock off of Stain Empire, the biggest alliance a few months ago. And they're fighting with FIX for Catch, which is a key region for the South. The ISS South Outpost is there too.

Yeah, no need for 0.0 entrance for a few months. By the time we are ready for the move, raising the funds to rebuild should be trivial.

Can POSes be placed in low sec? I thought it was only 0.0. If not, I think a .4 or .3 spot would be ideal.

From what I understand it's 0.7 or lower since the expansion. I think.

Oooooh my mistake then.  I knew the Something Awful guys were starting problems, based on stuff the folks in the corp channel were talking about.

I think it goes without saying that SA guys are starting trouble SOMEWHERE. That is pretty much a given  :-D

Is there a night of the week people would be interested to dedicating to mining/mining fleet defense?

The Goons are way up north, subletting a piece of Syndicate from The Five and pissing off the pirate corps in the area.  FIX and [5] are technically hostile, but we have little contact.  SA is the result of the Stain Civil War, and that's probably the root of the current conflict, Catch was ceded to FIX by SE during the civil war and SA wants it back now that it's over.  It put us in a position across their best route from Stain to Empire (although we only had sovereignty over western Catch and not the HED-GP "pipe", we spent a lot of time camping and patrolling in there), and they probably didn't like us camping on their oxygen supply.

--Dave

Can someone educate me on the directionals? I am having trouble grokking it when relating to 3 dimensional space.

As for mining/mining defense, I am down whenever we can get a robust group together. Doing it  solo or in duos is too risky and/or slow.

That'll be a nice spot for mining, but the lowsec linked off of there is heavily trafficked since it's the primary lowsec corridor between Matari and French space. It's not uncommon to see a big red splotch of ships killed along that route. Be cautious about entering that particular patch of lowsec.


We packed up all our physical goods last night, squeezing everything except for about 50,000 units of unrefined kernite into a couple indys. Mehatoor is an okay system for lowsec ops, but the nearby lowsec has no NPC stations in it. This means that it's rarely populated, but it's also a pain in the ass to mine in. There's one nice 0.2 system 3 jumps in (Oyeman or Oveman, stupid in-game font) with plenty of hemorphite and a bevy of delicious 175/185k battlecruiser rats. That said, if there's nice, empty 0.2 space nearer to an existing base, it might be more advantageous to investigate an office in that area instead of down in Devoid.

There's more to picking a POS location than just finding empty lowsec though; someone needs to pick up the moon-scanner tech and go out on a surveying operation to find out if there's any rare/valuable moon-minerals to be had.

Other than that, everyone should save any enriched uranium they happen to come across, since it's POS fuel. :)


POSes can be placed at any unoccupied moon in 0.0 through 0.7 security space. If you're in 0.4 through 0.7 space, your POS will consume additional fuel called 'charters' that must be purchased from the appropriate NPC faction (i.e. Amarr charters for Amarr space).


If you look at the map, zoomed out and flattened, you can roughly call the direction from the central lowsec areas towards The Citadel/The Forge "north". I'm guessing the designation came from early 2-D published maps being aligned that way.

When someone's refering to directions, I always use Teh Map (http://www.eve-files.com/media/corp/CRII/Latest.jpg)


Baaaaah, now I have to reactivate because I got hooked on the political game again :( And I'll have to dodge my rl friends, 'cause they're pirating it up, up north in Syndicate (I gotta ask them about those goons, I'm sure they're one of the "pissed pirate corps") and I don't feel like doing that. K, I'm off downloading the client... I hate you people  :|

Cool- thanks for the link. Wow, some of those areas are HUGE! Would be interesting to see how much they could continue to control if CCP added more routes into 0.0.

My account is active now, I'm idling in the F13 channel :)

Now I only have to figure out why the client runs at 10FPS  :|

Blah, our t1 has been down for days at work. No skill training or courier missions! I might actually have to log in from home this week, heh. AFK gaming ftw.

Is it strange that I'm thinking about starting a second account to go pirate this early?  :evil:

I have played at least a half dozen MMOGs, and I have never felt the urge to buy a 2nd account until now. The 'skills improve offline, only 1 character per account can be learning at any one time' thing is a perfect marketing tool. I am tempted to start a new character, crank up his INT, get all the learning out of the way and then dive into research.

Very tempting, I tell ya.

I just started a second account because my main has gone so heavily into Charisma oriented skills, I needed someone who could actually fight.

--Dave

Not at all especially since it's easy to run two clients (or more if you have enough RAM) on your machine at the same time.

I'm really really tempted to get a second account for EVE, something I've laughed at in the past. It would be quite helpful to have another one.

For those that haven't seen this, I think its pretty fucking cool.

http://www.eve-files.com/media/corp/j0sephine/rmr_size_chart.png

Why, yes, that is pretty fucking cool. VGA Planets use to have a chart like that.

Someone the other day was commenting that the bigger ships were pretty much only built by the huge zero-sec alliances... Were they refering to the HUGE things in those pictures?  Or the still very large but not the biggest ones?  A version of that with labels would be cool, I might have some idea what you were talking about then.  8)

Alkiera

I think anything above battleship-size on that chart is probably outside of the grasp of non-corporate banks. (Battleships are the top row, left hand 2 ships for Caldari, and move around slightly for the rest)

BSs themselves cost 100mil, then you have to fit them.  I shudder to think on the price of those big ships.   Though the ones right below them (the caldari BS) might be the Haulers, I'm not certain.  (I haven't seen one in-person and those preview pics can be misleading. )
I was just suprised to see that Minmatar Battlecruisers are nearly the same size as Battleships.  I thought they'd be a little smaller, along the same lines as the Amarr or Galliente relationship.

Here it is with labels (http://www.pandadesigns.com/games/eve/Ship_Chart_with_names.jpg). I'll try to dig up the original source link later -- there are other versions as well (e.g. black background).

I wonder how many guns go on those motherships.  :evil:

EDIT: Heh, the Minmatar Mothership looks a lot like the Mothership from Homeworld.

Thinking about it, that size chart just underscores the one thing that irks me about ship design in this game:  All the damn windows.

Sure, it looks cool to be piloting this Battlecruiser or Cruiser with more than just the Firgate's pilot-window, but who the fuck are they for?  I don't have a crew (though that would be one really keen aspect to have had in-game. Marine fights/ boardings a-la MOO2) and I'm encased in this pod of life-sustaining goo.  So why all the lights?

Straz- Motherships are limited to 8-slots in High/Mid/Low.  A "hindsight is 20-20" drawback to putting in such large ships after release and initial design.  Yeah, they *should* have point defenses as well as guns to take-out larger ships AND their WMDs, but because of the orignal fitting (and I imagine database) layout, they suffer some weird limitations.

Kind of like having a 4-armed race in a fantasy MMO, but only 2 weapon slots.

From what I've gotten out of the abomination that is their official forums, there actually is a crew on most of the ships, taking care of most of the work, engineering, maintenance and all that. What you play as is the captain, the one making all decisions safely encapsulated in your pod. The ships are still manned, and some of them have quite large crews (I think someone mentioned a crew of ~4000 for a BS).

However, don't take what I say as gospel, as it's all second-hand (and quite possibly all wrong). Anyways, it would (somewhat) explain the windows.

Quite a few of the background stories make reference to the ships crews (thes one that  is actually just about a crewmember) the upshot is that the Jovian pod technology radically reduced the crew required and quite possibly removed them from the smaller ships

That chart only goes uo to the dreadnaughts I believe, this is the one you want to look at :-)

http://www.eve-files.com/media/12/eve_chart-rmr.jpg

Is it me, or does it seem to anyone else that once they got up to the titans, they lost all sense of design? Except for the Amarr, they look like they were designed by the blind guys who tried to figure out what an elephant was - just a bunch of interesting shapes stuck together in random order, with no attempt to turn the ideas in to a cohesive whole.

Yeah, the big ships are fugly.

Most of the really large ships look kind of like semi-technical bits of driftwood, what with all the striations, edges and chips taken out of them. Or maybe stone tools.

But yeah, fugly.

Some exceptionally wealthy individuals have their own Dreadnoughts (the fourth largest in each), and some are buying carriers (next one up).  Lots of wealthy corps and individuals have Freighters (next down from Dreads).  Only the richest corps will be able to field a Mothership (second largest) and it's taking whole large alliances months to build up the materials for a Titan.  First few to field them are going to *stomp* all over everything else, the Titan has a weapon that can kill an entire battleship fleet in one shot.

--Dave

Games like Eve need friendly fire turned on.

There isn't any way to turn it off.  Use AE weapons like Smartbombs and it *will* damage all ships in the area of effect.  It's possible to damage your friends with the larger missles, as well.

--Dave

Ok, that's good to hear. Your description of the Titan made it sound like friendly fire wasn't an issue. I guess people won't be firing the uber ion cannon blindly.

I keep imagining the ships from Independance Day.

I'm thinking these ships are so big, that it'd be hard to have a cohesive design to them, kind of like the ships in Independence Day as gimpy said.

I think they look Kinda cool, though it's still beyond stupid that they'd be limited to what, 8 weapon slots?

It bugs me that the [first published] picture of a titan here http://www.eve-online.com/background/potw/apr01-01.asp (which I believe is supposed to be the Caldari one) doesnt really look like the one that ended up in the game.

There is also a huge skill (and fuel) requirement for the Titan's Ultimate Weapon Systems too. Titans are the ultimate alliance project, and quite possibly could be "shit a titan, okay lets go fight one system over and make it use more fuel in jumping there" - repeat a few times.

Isnt that why they got the 'doomsday weapons'?

To be honest just giving them more (say 12?) large turrets/siege/cruise launchers would have been just as pants

It should be able to blow up a planet.  :evil:

Why do you need to blow up a planet when you can fly straight through them?

From what I recall reading, this won't work.  I believe Titans have the ability to fire through the warp gates they can open, so long as there's a properly-fitted ship targeting for them.  Sure, your alliance loses that ship, but if it's enough to wipe an entire enemy battlegroup, it's worth it.

So you need to just get a ship close enough....that's easy enough...right?  :evil:

So if someone is blasted by a doomsday weapon, are they instantly podded?  Common sense says "yes" but gameplay sense says "no".

It will be interesting the first time someone takes one to Jita and blows up 154 carebears.

I've wondered if they considered that at all. Or, if they did, do they care?  Are the Concord ships in the area enough to take out a Titan? Probably not, since there's pirate discussions about tank setups to survive being CONCORDOKKENed in higher-sec space.

 It's certainly one way for ambitious pirate corps to take care of the lag/ safezone miner "problem." Assuming, of course, that they have the facilities in-place to build one.

Apparently dreadnaughts and above cant go above 0.4 space

Do you mean they can't fit through the warp gates?  Somewhat cheesy but I'm not ready to go toe-to-toe with a dread.  Or a cruiser.

Speaking of safezone miners, those bastids took all of my omber.  At least now I have Astrogeology lv2 and can fill my hold with rich plagioclase in two minutes, without a drone.

From what my friends and I were talking about, yes Doomsday weapons can be fired through C-Fields, but only if they are in the same system. If you can sneak a Titan into an engagement, you deserve to wtfpwn because the opposing fleets scouting was horrible.

More like 400. It is getting crazy in the hubs. And I would pay good hard cash to see that happen like once a week. Either that, or make the security status revert to 0.0 whenever the population gets to 400 or more. That would make things interesting!

Whilst trying to sift through the gibberish on the EVE boards, the board goons claim that while you can't bring such a ship into hi-sec space, there's nothing to prevent you *building* it there initially, creating an orgy of destruction in that system, and then warping it out (provided you can access lo-sec from your system).  That would be a heck of an inauguration party if it's true...

*edit*  Finished off my trial account today, I must say I enjoyed it even if I didn't get into anything higher than a cruiser.  I think I'll sub, but probably not for a couple weeks.  Frig V should be close by then, although I'm not sure if I want to delve into something like assault ships or just go on into battlecruisers.  Most likely whatever my budget of ~13mil ISK is closer to purchasing ship/skill-wise :)

Dreads and higher dont use the gate at all (yes I think they are too big) I hear you need another player in the destination system (which has to be within your jump range, which can be several systems away) to create a C-field for the ship to jump to.

As was mentioned above apparently you can build your dread+ in a high sec system as long as you have enough range to jump to a 0.4 or lower and keep going, if not you will be stuck in that system

anyone know if there's  a complete and current Player Guide available to download?  Seems there's a Prima Guide but it's only 2003, and there's also just the online guide.  Personal preference, just want some paper to read (is there a single Player Guide pdf?).  Also, want to have something I can give a friend who has the same preference.  Thx.

Dont touch the Prima guide with a barge pole.

I own it and it ceased being accurate the minute the game was released! (very obviously compiled during beta)

There is a pretty nice guide you can download here:

http://www.logophile.net/pil/

The Pilkington Guides to EVE v1.2b (current as of June 2005 so it's not too far back).

Not really a newb guide I guess:

Contents:
- Guide to Agent Missions v1.2b (2005/10/25)
- Guide to Research v1.2 (2005/09/04)
- Amarr storyline mission text (2004/06/20)
- Caldari storyline mission text (2004/10/24)
- Gallente storyline mission text (2004/06/22)
- Minmatar storyline mission text (2004/10/27)
- Contraband Reference Card (2004/07/30)
- Faction Relations Table (2005/09/04)
- Skill Explorer

Darn - virus blocked.

AND THIS IS MY LEET POST!!!!!!

I bought the Prima guide used off of Amazon a couple of weeks ago. It sucks ass. It has about 40 pages about the various racial shoips, then about 150 pages of 'Pirate Locations'. Then a few pages about corps. It would have been a piece of shit when the game came out; now it is beyond worthless.

Yep - the ship stats (the main reason I got it) was mostly incorrect at launch, both in terms of the number of high/mid/low slots and the skill bonuses they gave. Hell even some of the pictures (and I think names) were wrong!

This is why guides are stupid, especially for an MMO.

I would see my friend buy a new guide for FFXI every couple of months and just laugh.

I have to say, this is close to the epitome of the casual's game.  I can log on, start training a skill, and log off, do something else, spend time with spouse, work around the house, whatever.  Have a long trip for an agent?  Set autopilot, and go out to wash the car.  Come in halfway thru washing car, say hi to agent, set destination, autopilot, go back to finish the car.

I'm typically pretty busy at work, I don't have time to sit and focus on a game for even 5-10 minutes.  But I can VNC to my home machine long enough to log in, pick the next skill to train, and log out.  Especially as a newer character, that's pretty useful, to help broaden my skill base.

I still want CCP to write Fantasy EVE...  or license the engine to someone who will.

Alkiera

Heh - autopilot can get you in trouble though Alkiera - make sure and watch your route to destination - any red systems and you could be in trouble from pirates - I learnt that to my cost!

Evegeek link in another thread led me to this:

http://eve-central.com/home/

The trade route finder is a very very cool idea, almost feels like cheating somehow, but free isk is free isk   :lol:

Grey area, I suppose, since I could just jump to the nearby regions, dump a text file and figure this out myself.  I won't be doing any long-haul work anyway.  I will probably be using this a bit... it's still an ass-pain for me to haul in quantity.

Looks like there is no data for the Kor-Azor area in the past long time.

Did you try using that tool to upload info? Of course, there could be no *good* trade routes. Though you might try the other way (say, Domain to Kor-Azor) too.

Hello - that would be work....

Oh I know, but *someone* needs to try it and see if there's anything good!

You can do half the work, get prices in two systems from the tool and compare to a manual dump from Kor-Azor.  Yeah, I know, it's work, but I am in Claulenne for the time being.

Ok I'd like to learn more. 

Where can I find out about how people are setting up bases, which I presume are the equivalent of player cities?

Is there any info on 0.0, which I presume is a "wild zone", anyone can build a starbase there?

Just like to learn a bit about how certain corps are claiming areas of space and maybe the player-content-creation game.

Pretty impressed with Eve the more I learn.

I am a stinking noob. Having said that, all of 0.0 is claimed by someone. Thats not to say a corp with strength couldn't but the easy way is to allay with existing forces. There are members on this board way more knowageable than I but that seems the short answer. Eve has been out for years now. Its the land of player made content and to the extent I can see it its cool and aggravating and all like that.

0.0 appears to be largely empty

While all of it may have been 'claimed' by one alliance or the other theres a big difference between it being 'claimed' and 'settled'

Looking at the political map that was linked to [in this thread I hope] most of the claimed space boundaries are where the choke points are (i.e. systems with only 2 gate, one in one out) which make it much easier for the 'owners' to exert control over the space contained behind it.

Theres nothing stopping you [besides cost and time] getting your own station, wandering out to some distant 0.0 sector (usually in the very early morning when less people are on) and popping it down - the problem is that you'd need to be able to defend it from destruction by the 'owners' of the region you just built it in (which is where the plan goes horribly wrong)

Unfortunately it does seem to be the case that, if you want a slice of 0.0 action, you need to sell your soul to one of the existing alliances with some control out here (or alternatively join some new alliance which is gaining enough momentum to be able to establish itself in 0.0 soon - lots of PvP in that route before you get to play space station manager)

I've been looking at the options of joining a '0.0 alliance' for my corp - unfortunately some of them have rediculous (for my corp) membership criteria (ISS for example want 25mil joining fee, plus 25mil per month (more if you have more than 10 members) plus your own station within 2 weeks of joining (they dont appear to offer any help getting that up))

Isn't there a new sector coming soon?  Like sometime this month?

There are new servers coming up, to better run the existing stuff, from what I understood.  It's to help fix some of the server-side lag and other similar issues they've been experiencing since they started growing lately.

At least, that's what I got out of the text they've had up on the launcher lately.

Alkiera

From whore'ing it up on the eve-online forums how I understand it is there are several parts of 0.0 where you could get in and try to exist.  But those are the areas where several smaller alliances are all duking it out.  The large alliances exist because they are in a way a necessity.  Complete chaos ensues if no one faction can actually lock down the area, I think that is the situation in Curse atm for example.

Sorry about last vasishing last night.  Internet connection died for some reason. 

I had mine die for just long enough to make me log in again.